Sir Hermann Bondi KCB FRS[1] (1 November 1919 – 10 September 2005)[7] was an Austrian-British mathematician and cosmologist.

He is best known for developing the steady state model of the universe with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold as an alternative to the Big Bang theory.

He showed early prodigious ability at mathematics, and was recommended to Arthur Eddington by Abraham Fraenkel.

Realizing the perilous position of his parents in 1938, shortly before the Anschluss, he sent them a telegram telling them to leave Austria at once.

[citation needed] In the early years of World War II, he was interned on the Isle of Man and in Canada as a friendly enemy alien.

Bondi and Gold were released from internment by the end of 1941, and worked with Fred Hoyle on radar at the Admiralty Signals Establishment.

He popularized the sticky bead argument which was said to be originally due, anonymously, to Richard Feynman, for the claim that physically meaningful gravitational radiation is indeed predicted by general relativity, an assertion which was controversial up until about 1955.

[18] He married Christine Stockman, also a mathematician and astronomer, in 1947; she had been one of Hoyle's research students and like him she went on to be active in the humanist movement.