In response to: A Stellar Student, He Transformed Our Understanding of the Stars
Current issue
December 2025
Judge Michael Park ’98; shifts in DEI initiatives; a night at the new art museum.
Judge Michael Park ’98; shifts in DEI initiatives; a night at the new art museum.
“Despite his spiritual upbringing, Russell came from a mathematical family,” writes Harrison Blackman ’17 about in the Princeton Portrait about astronomer and astrophysicist Henry Norris Russell.
Many of the great mathematicians and physicists in history were devout. One of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857), wrote, “I am a Christian, that is to say, I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ as did Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Fermat, Leibniz, Pascal, Grimaldi, Euler, Guldin, Boscovich, Gerdil; as did all the great astronomers, physicists, and geometricians of past ages.”
One could add to that list many more recent names, such as Fr. Angelo Secchi, one of the founders of astrophysics; Fr. Georges Lemaȋtre, founder of the Big Bang theory; and Kurt Gödel, whose work in mathematics was epoch-making (and who spent most of his career in Princeton).