Maarten Schmidt (28 December 1929 – 17 September 2022) was a Dutch-born American astronomer who first measured the distances of quasars.

[3] His father, Wilhelm, worked as an accountant for the Dutch government; his mother, Annie Wilhelmina (Haringhuizen), was a housewife.

[3] After completing his doctorate, Schmidt resided in the United States for two years on a Carnegie Fellowship.

He returned briefly to the Netherlands, but ultimately emigrated to the US on a permanent basis in 1959 to work at the California Institute of Technology.

In 1963, using the 200-inch reflector telescope at the Palomar Observatory, Schmidt identified the visible object corresponding to one of these radio sources, known as 3C 273 and also studied its spectrum.