The Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris mourns the loss of George Fitzgerald Smoot, III, an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and Nobel laureate, who passed away in late September at his home in Paris. Smoot was one of the pioneers of observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos and placed cosmology on a firm experimental footing. He studied mathematics before switching to physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obt...