Cédric Villani

Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani (French: [se.dʁik pa.tʁis tjɛ.ʁi vi.la.ni]; born 5 October 1973) is a French mathematician working primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010 and was the director of Pierre and Marie Curie University's Institut Henri Poincaré between 2010 and 2017.

Villani is also a politician. He sits in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, representing Essonne's 5th constituency for En Marche !, the centrist political party of the French president Emmanuel Macron which currently holds the majority following the 2017 French legislative election.^[2] He was elected president of the French Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices in July 2017.

Biography

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Villani was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and studied there from 1992 to 1996. He was later appointed an assistant professor in the same school. He received his doctorate at Paris Dauphine University in 1998, under the supervision of Pierre-Louis Lions, and became professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon in 2000. He is now professor at the University of Lyon. He has been the director of Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris since 2009.^[3][4]

He has held various visiting positions at Georgia Tech (Fall 1999), the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 2004), and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (Spring 2009).^[5]

Mathematical work

Villani has worked on the theory of partial differential equations involved in statistical mechanics, specifically the Boltzmann equation, where, with Laurent Desvillettes, he was the first to prove how quickly convergence occurs for initial values not near equilibrium.^[4] He has written with Giuseppe Toscani on this subject. With Clément Mouhot, he has worked on nonlinear Landau damping.^[6] He has worked on the theory of optimal transport and its applications to differential geometry, and with John Lott has defined a notion of bounded Ricci curvature for general measured length spaces.^[7]

Villani received the Fields Medal for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation.^[4] He described the development of his theorem in his autobiographical book Théorème vivant (2012), published in English translation as Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure (2015). He gave a TED talk at the 2016 conference in Vancouver.^[8]

Political career

In 2017, it was announced that Villani has been selected as a candidate for En Marche! in the French legislative election, 2017, for Essonne's 5th constituency.^[9][10] In the first round of voting, Villani obtained 47% of the vote and was thus strongly placed for the second round^[11] which he won with 69.36% of the vote.^[12]

Awards and honours

Diplomas, titles and awards

• 1998: PhD Thesis (advisor P.-L. Lions)
• 2000: Habilitation dissertation
• 2001: Louis Armand Prize of the Academy of Sciences
• 2003: Peccot-Vimont Prize and Cours Peccot of the Collège de France
• 2003: Plenary lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematical Physics (Lisbonne)
• 2004: Harold Grad lecturer
• 2004: Visiting Miller Professor, University of California Berkeley.
• 2006: Institut Universitaire de France
• 2006: Invited lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians (Madrid)
• 2007: Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand (French Academy of Sciences)
• 2008: Prize of the European Mathematical Society
• 2009: Henri Poincaré Prize
• 2009: Fermat Prize
• 2010: Fields Medal
• 2013: Gibbs lecturer: On Disorder, Mixing and Equilibration^[13]
• 2014: Joseph L. Doob Prize by the American Mathematical Society for his book Optimal Transport: Old and New (Springer Verlag 2009)^[14]

Extra-academic distinctions

• 2009: Knight of the National Order of Merit (France)
• 2011: Knight of the Legion of Honor
• 2013: Member of the French Academy of Sciences^[15]
• 2016: Ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Selected writings

• Limites hydrodynamiques de l'équation de Boltzmann, Séminaire Bourbaki, June 2001; Astérisque vol. 282, 2002.
• A Review of Mathematical Topics in Collisional Kinetic Theory, in Handbook of Mathematical Fluid Dynamics, edited by S. Friedlander and D. Serre, vol. 1, Elsevier, 2002, ISBN 978-0-444-50330-5. doi:10.1016/S1874-5792(02)80004-0.
• Topics in Optimal Transportation, volume 58 of Graduate Studies in Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, 2003, ISBN 978-0-8218-3312-4.
• Optimal transportation, dissipative PDE's and functional inequalities, pp. 53–89 in Optimal Transportation and Applications, edited by L. A. Caffarelli and S. Salsa, volume 1813 of Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Springer, 2003, ISBN 978-3-540-40192-6.
• Cercignani's conjecture is sometimes true and always almost true, Communications in Mathematical Physics, vol. 234, No. 3 (March 2003), pp. 455–490, doi:10.1007/s00220-002-0777-1.
• On the trend to global equilibrium for spatially inhomogeneous kinetic systems: the Boltzmann equation (with Laurent Desvillettes), Inventiones Mathematicae, vol. 159, #2 (2005), pp. 245–316, doi:10.1007/s00222-004-0389-9.
• Mathematics of Granular Materials, Journal of Statistical Physics, vol. 124, #2–4 (July/August 2006), pp. 781–822, doi:10.1007/s10955-006-9038-6.
• Optimal transport, old and new, volume 338 of Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, Springer, 2009, ISBN 978-3-540-71049-3.
• Ricci curvature for metric-measure spaces via optimal transport (with John Lott), Annals of Mathematics vol. 169, No. 3 (2009), pp. 903–991.
• Hypocoercivity, volume 202, No. 950 of Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8218-4498-4.
• Clément Mouhot; Cédric Villani (2009). "On Landau damping". arXiv:0904.2760  [math.AP]. 
• Théorème vivant, Bernard Grasset, Paris 2012
• Les Coulisses de la création, Flammarion, Paris 2015 (with composer and pianist Karol Beffa)
• Freedom in Mathematics, Springer India, 2016 (with Pierre Cartier, Jean Dhombres, Gerhard Heinzmann), ISBN 978-81-322-2786-1.
  • Translation from the French language edition: Mathématiques en liberté, La Ville Brûle, Montreuil 2012, ISBN 978-23-601-2026-0.

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Cédric Villani

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cédric Villani.

• Cédric Villani's website
• Cédric Villani at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Video Interview by ICTP
• Review of 'Birth of a Theorem'