Hermann bondi biography of william

Wartime internee left lasting legacy

Professor Sir Hermann Bondi, who has died aged 85, was a scientist whose mathematical virtuosity enabled him to make sense of the cosmic maelstrom and a civil servant with the management nous to survive the turbulence of post-war politics.

The independent nuclear deterrent and the Thames flood barrier are just two of the wildly dissimilar projects he promoted in a career that took him from internment as an enemy alien during the second world war to the top of the civil service via leadership of the European Space Research Organisation, later to become the European Space Agency.

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He was also a first-rate academic whose mentoring qualities saw him labelled the "supervisor's supervisor", a witty and energetic teacher whose Cambridge lectures, according to fellow academics, were a tour de force.

He could give almost his entire course on mathematical physics without notes. He was appointed master of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1983 a post