ABSTRACT
On March 8, 1965, Zeldovich’s birthday, the few and very young students and colleagues of Yakov Borisovich at the Institute of Applied Mathematics (IAM), which then included myself, when I had a temporary fellowship, merrily expressed the wish that he complete the problem of galaxy formation by the end of the year, and simultaneously resolve the mystery of the quasars. Both themes, as is known, deeply engaged Zeldovich. Quasars were discovered in 1963, and the problem of the origin of galaxies had been waiting for a solution since the middle of the 1920s, when it was first established that the extragalactic nebulae were gigantic stellar systems. In our birthday wish, the only joking and nonserious lines were, perhaps, the deadlines we set; in its content, the wish corresponded well to the goals of Zeldovich, which were subsequently realized. Zeldovich turned out to be among those who first suggested that black holes generated the energy in the nuclei of quasars. Today, there are few who doubt that this is, indeed, the case. And the largest contribution to modern galactic cosmology belongs to Zeldovich-his famous ‘pancake’ theory.
