Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) 5

Lemaître was a physics professor and Catholic priest whose work in the late 1920s and early 1930s led him to propose the Big Bang theory, although he referred to it as the 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'. He was also elected to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which he later became president.

Religion and the Big Bang theory are not mutually exclusive.