Maurice Loewy

[1] Loewy's Jewish parents moved to Vienna in 1841 to escape the antisemitism of their home town.

[citation needed] Loewy became an assistant at the Vienna Observatory, working on celestial mechanics.

However, the institutions of Austria-Hungary did not permit a Jew to advance to a senior position without renouncing his faith and embracing Catholicism.

He worked on the orbits of asteroids and comets and on the measurement of longitude, improving the accuracy of the Connaissance des Temps.

Loewy became director of the Paris Observatory in 1896, reorganising the institution and establishing a department of physical astronomy.