That one and “This is not a pipe.” But I’ll admit the first thought I have when I hear his name is the Paul Simon song.
Another famous Belgian I just came across: Sister Luc-Gabrielle (born Jeanine Deckers), the “Singing Nun”, Dominican nun who wrote and recorded “Dominique”, released under the name Soeur Sourire (Smiling Sister) in 1963.
From this Song Facts page about her and this song:
I voted for Hergé, but my wife suggested Georges Lemaître
who was probably one of the smartest people in the entire 20th century.
Yes, Lemaitre was popular in another version I did of this poll as a write-in.
I chose Leopold without looking at the choices. JVCD probably wouldn’t have pinged my radar despite his sobriquet. I’m a huge fan of Merckx, but I would have to think about it before I pegged him as Belgian. I’ve been to a couple of shows of Magritte, but I didn’t even realize he was Belgian. I think a lot of people would recognize his painting of the dude in the bowler hat with the apple in front of his face, but would not be able to name the artist.
That just means Hampshire and Bone to me.
Eh, King Leopold’s Ghost sold around 600,000 copies and was a bestseller. Pretty good for a popular history.
I was thinking Leopold before I even opened the thread because history nerd. But I’m not surprised at the SDMB polling. Since Van Damme wasn’t on the list (I would have voted for Leopold regardless), it makes sense to me that Leopold is better known as symbol of Belgian-ness than Magritte.
Ditto. Reading through the list I agreed that some of them were excellent choices, but I stuck with Leopold.
Hadn’t realised Audrey was born in Belgium – her father was British and her mother was Dutch, and as noted above she spent the war in the Netherlands (she was in Arnhem at the time of the “bridge too far” battle).
Rubens
Wikipedia lists “Flemish Painters” and “Belgian Painters” separately. Perhaps you only get to be Belgian after 1830?
Rubens is clearly the answer if we’re talking about the most famous person from territories now know as ‘Belgium’.
But quite apart from the wider definitional problems surrounding the Spanish Netherlands in that period, there is a complication - Rubens was born at Siegen, which is well within what is now Germany, and he spent his early childhood in Cologne.
And do you know who thought this important?
The Nazis. Purely by coincidence, the invasion of Belgium in 1940 almost exactly coincided with the tercentenary of Rubens’s death. The occupying authorities therefore played up the idea that Rubens was actually German, in the hope of persuading the Belgians that they were really Germans too.
As for Leopold II, he wanted to build a huge Panthéon commemorating famous Belgians on the Koekelberg Hill in Brussels. At the time there were doubts as to whether there were enough famous Belgians to justify this.
I didn’t see where this got answered, but Jean Claude van Damme has often been styled as “The Muscles from Brussels,” so if you know that nickname and where Brussels is, his nationality is self-evident.
Thank you. I’d never heard of that name for him, but it make perfect sense.
I have to say, this thread was a bright spot for me during the long election season. No matter what disasters were being predicted or enacted, and one of the longest threads in SDMB history just took off to discuss every aspect of the election, this completely innocuous, oddity, thread about famous Belgians, just kept clicking along.
Not everything in November was election-related, and Dopes continued to delve into some of the most obscure minutia possible, while simultaneously contemplating The End of the American Experiment™!
Thanks, Dopers. 
The most famous now but who will remain famous ?
Mercx and Van Damme will be forgotten in just a few years.
Thank you! I hoped exactly this.
I suspect that Lemaître will still be famous hundreds of years from now, assuming the Big Bang theory holds up. He might even get a planet named after him. He’s already got an asteroid.