Cédric Villani

Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani is a French politician and mathematician working primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry, and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010, and he was the director of Sorbonne University's Institut Henri Poincaré from 2009 to 2017. As of September 2022, he is a professor at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.

Villani has given two lectures at the Royal Institution, the first titled 'Birth of a Theorem.' The English translation of his book Théorème vivant (Living Theorem) has the same title. In the book, he describes the links between his research on kinetic theory and one of the mathematicians Carlo Cercignani: Villani, in fact, proved the so-called Cercignani's conjecture. His second lecture at the Royal Institution is titled 'The Extraordinary Theorems of John Nash.'

Villani was elected as the deputy for Essonne's 5th constituency in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, during the 2017 legislative election. He was elected as a member of La République En Marche! (LREM), but in May 2020, left the party to form a new party, Ecology, Democracy, Solidarity (EDS). Following the dissolution of EDS, Villani joined Ecology Generation and ran for re-election under the banner of the NUPES. He was elected Vice President of the French Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices in July 2017.

He lost his seat in the 2022 French legislative election to La Republique En Marche! Candidate Paul Midy by 19 votes. After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Villani was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and studied there from 1992 to 1996, after which he was appointed an agrégé préparateur at the same school. He received his doctorate at Paris Dauphine University in 1998, under the supervision of Pierre-Louis Lions, and became a professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon in 2000. 

He is now a professor at the University of Lyon. He was the director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris from 2009 to 2017. 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).

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. He has written with Giuseppe Toscani on this subject. With Clément Mouhot, he has worked on nonlinear Landau damping. 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 generally measured length spaces.

He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2015 and 2016. Villani received the Fields Medal for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation. 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.