Cédric Villani

Cédric Villani is a renowned French mathematician, born in 1973, who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010 – an award that is often called the “Nobel of mathematics”. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris – where he would later be an assistant lecturer for four years – he completed, in 1998, his doctoral thesis on mathematical theory in Boltzmann’s equation, which was supervised by Pierre-Louis Lions, another prestigious French mathematician, who won the Fields Medal in 1994. From 2000 to 2010, Villani taught at the Lyon École Normale Supérieure, later moving to the University of Lyon, where he remains currently. As a visiting lecturer, he also taught at Atlanta, Berkeley and Princeton, in the United States. Since 2009, he has taken on the position of director of the Henri Poincaré Institute, an institution that is over 80 years old and devoted to welcoming researchers and promoting the exchange. It is a mainstay of French mathematics. In addition to the Fields Medal, Cédric Villani has received the European Mathematical Society award (2008), the Henri Poincaré Prize (2009) and the Fermat Prize (2010), among others, and he has been, due to his popularity beyond the scientific domains, the French mathematics community spokesman in the media and in politics. His main fields of research are kinetic theory (the Boltzmann and Vlasov equations and their variables) and optimal transport and its applications, a field in which he wrote two works of reference. In 2014, Cédric Villani was a guest at the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival, for a special session devoted to the relation between Cinema and Mathematics, in which we displayed, among other films, La Main de Villani (Jean-Michel Alberola) and Comment j’ai Detesté les Maths (Olivier Peyon), both starring Villani. His latest book Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure will be published in Portugal by Gradiva.