I tagged this sentence as "lie", because they cannot have calculated any shape of the universe BEFORE the Big Bang, logically.

Hmm... Did the universe have a shape before the Big Bang? Technically, we don't really know, but wasn't it a big hot ball, supposedly?

This can't be "lie" no matter if the Universe had any shape before the Big Bang or not, I believe. We don't even know if the Big Bang really occurred. Additionally, the sentence don't state that they succeeded in their calculations.

@sharptoothed:

To the best of my knowledge, "to calculate" is almost always used with a perfect aspect implicit. For the imperfect, one would usually say "to try to calculate". So, the sentence does imply that they succeeded in the calculations (whether they calculated correctly is another question, though...)

@Vortarulo:

I also don't think that this should be tagged as "Lie".

Well, the sentence is still paradox, okay. There is no "before the Big Bang" by definition. It's like asking or trying to watch what was before the beginning of a video tape.
But okay... they used math to do something weird. Granted. ;)