After leaving his hometown Vienna for Cambridge, Sir Hermann Bondi (1919-2005) in 1943 became a research fellow at Trinity College and in 1945 an Assistant Lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge University. In 1954 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at King’s College London.
In the early 1960s he served on high‑level defence committees. Nominated by the UK Government, he served as Director General of ESRO from 1967 until 1971. After leaving ESRO, he was appointed Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Ministry of Defence (1971-1977), Chief Scientist of the Department of Energy (1977-1980), and Chairman of the Natural Environment Research Council (1980-1984).
During his career, he was awarded several honorary doctorates (universities of Sussex, Bath, Surrey, York, Southampton, Salford, Birmingham, St Andrews, Portsmouth, and Vienna); the Gold Medal of the Einstein Society in 1983, Decoration of Honour for Science and Art, Austria in 1997, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2001. His scientific achievements earned him election to the Royal Society in 1959. In 1973 he was given a prestigious British order of chivalry Knight Commander of the Bath.
As a scientist, Bondi was especially known for his discoveries in general relativity and was the first to study how negative mass interacts with gravity. Together with two other scientists he met at Cambridge, Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold, Bondi introduced the steady-state theory of the expanding universe in 1948. The steady-state theory was an alternative to Big Bang cosmology and presented the view that the universe has no beginning or end in time.
Bondi died in Cambridge in 2005.