means a dutch-american astronomer whose work on planetary formation predicted a disc of icy debris beyond neptune, later named the kuiper belt after him.

from born in the netherlands in 1905, kuiper moved to the us and became a driving force in mid-20th-century planetary astronomy, discovering moons of uranus and neptune and championing the idea that comets and icy bodies lingered in a belt past neptune's orbit, a hypothesis confirmed decades after his 1973 death.