Hermitian matrices, appeared in independent works by Golden and Thompson published in 1965. Both of these were motivated by considerations in statistical mechanics. In recent years the Golden-Thompson inequality has found applications to random matrix theory. In this survey article we detail some historical aspects relating to Thompson's work, giving in particular an hitherto unpublished proof due to Dyson, and correspondence with Pólya. We show too how the
2×2
case relates to hyperbolic geometry, and how the original inequality holds true with the trace operation replaced by any unitarily invariant norm. In relation to the random matrix applications, we review its use in the derivation of concentration type lemmas for sums of random matrices due to Ahlswede-Winter, and Oliveira, generalizing various classical results.