Cédric Villani

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, 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 professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon in 2000. He is now professor at the University of Lyon. He was 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).

On 19 October 2014, in the context of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy's inaugural Albertine festival, Villani appeared in conversation with the Nobel Prize winning mathematician John F. Nash, Jr.

Several months later, on 23 May 2015, Nash, along with his wife Alicia, died in a car crash. Speaking at the Hay Festival, just days after his death, Villani announced that Nash had told him, in Norway on 20 May, that he had found a 'replacement equation' for Einstein's theory of relativity.

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. 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. 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 gave a TED talk at the 2016 conference in Vancouver.

Political career

In 2017, it was announced that Villani had been selected as a candidate for En Marche! (LREM) in the 2017 French legislative election, for Essonne's 5th constituency. In the first round of voting, Villani obtained 47% of the vote and was thus strongly placed for the second round which he won with 69.36% of the vote.

In 2019, Villani applied to be selected to lead the LREM candidate slate for the 2020 Paris election. By July 2019, he was one of three LREM candidates, all deputies in the National Assembly, still seeking the position; the other two were Benjamin Griveaux (who had been the government spokesperson) and Hugues Renson (who had been the vice-president of the National Assembly). On 10 July, the nomination committee picked Griveaux. On 4 September, Villani officially announced his candidacy for the municipal election.

Other activities

• France China Foundation, former Member of the Strategic Committee{{cite web |archive-date=10 June 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170610024441/http://francechinafoundation.org/strategic/}} In 2018, the French economics magazine Challenges said that Villani has been approached by Europanova thinktank. He presided over the jury of Digital In-Pulse, a startup program dedicated to accompanying entrepreneurs and start-ups, managed by Chinese corporate Huawei. The magazine also says that Villani is still the President of the endowment funds of the French Henri Poincaré Institute, and Huawei is among the top private donors. Villani declined the journalist's request for comment, and the article indicates that the French counter-intelligence service presented him as "too naïve" regarding those opportunities.

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: (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
• 2014: Joseph L. Doob Prize by the American Mathematical Society for his book Optimal Transport: Old and New (Springer Verlag 2009)

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
• 2016: Ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
• 2022: Fellow of the International Science Council

In 2020, a new spider species of the family Araneidae, Araniella villanii, was named after him.

Selected writings

• 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, .
• Optimal transport, old and new, volume 338 of Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, Springer, 2009, .
• Hypocoercivity, volume 202, No. 950 of Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 2009, .
• 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), . Translation from the French language edition: Mathématiques en liberté, La Ville Brûle, Montreuil 2012, .
• Birth of a Theorem, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2015; translated by Malcolm DeBevoise.
• De mémoire vive, Une histoire de l'aventure numérique, Philippe Dewost, Cédric Villani, Éditions Première Partie, 2022, .

References

References

1. Sylvain Guilbaud; Antoine Walraet. "[http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/cedric-villani/ Cédric Villani]", ''[[Encyclopædia Universalis]]''.
2. Mercier, Romain. (2025-09-05). "La star des mathématiques Cédric Villani a fait sa rentrée à l’Université de Rennes".
3. Villani, Cédric. (22 April 2015). "Birth of a Theorem". The Royal Institution.
4. Villani, Cédric. (2 November 2016). "The Extraordinary Theorems of John Nash". The Royal Institution.
5. [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-12/macron-team-announces-candidates-for-france-parliament-election/8519826 Emmanuel Macron team announces candidates for France's June parliamentary election], [[ABC News Online]], 12 May 2017.
6. (19 May 2020). "Macron loses majority as defectors form new party". BBC News.
7. (19 May 2020). "Macron's party loses outright majority in French parliament".
8. (23 May 2022). "Legislative: in Ulis, Cédric Villani defends his new label Nupes".
9. Ministère de l'Intérieur. "Résultats des élections législatives 2022".
10. Villani, Cédric. "Biography".
11. [http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=56307 Mathematics Genealogy Project – Cédric Villani]. Accessed on line 20 August 2010.
12. "Fields Medal – Cédric Villani".
13. "Curriculum Vitae (Cédric Villani)".
14. Albertine Books. (September 26, 2014). "Festival Albertine".
15. Kaye, Yasmin. (May 30, 2015). "A Beautiful Mind's John Nash 'replaced' Einstein's theory of relativity just before his death".
16. (2010). "Landau damping". Journal of Mathematical Physics.
17. (2004). "Ricci curvature for metric-measure spaces via optimal transport".
18. Alexander, Amir. (4 March 2015). "Mathematics: Groping in the dark for glimpses of beauty (joint review of ''Birth of a Theorem'' by Cédric Villani and ''Mathematics without Apologies'' by Michael Harris)". Nature.
19. (6 June 2016). "Cédric Villani: What's so sexy about math?". [[TED (conference).
20. (11 May 2017). "France's Macron announces gender equal list of political outsiders". BBC News.
21. "Communiqué de presse – Liste des investis aux élections législatives {{!}} En Marche !".
22. (15 June 2017). "Cédric Villani : "L'idée, c'est d'avoir des compétences variées"".
23. Ministère de l'Intérieur. "Elections législatives 2017".
24. Cosnard, Denis. (10 July 2019). "Elections municipales à Paris: Benjamin Griveaux choisi pour représenter LRM". [[Le Monde]].
25. R. Bx.. (4 September 2019). "Municipales : Cédric Villani officialise sa candidature à la mairie de Paris".
26. Izambard, Antoine. (2018-06-27). "Comment la France surveille le géant des télécoms Huawei".
27. (2007). "Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians Madrid, August 22–30, 2006". European Mathematical Society.
28. [https://www.ams.org/meetings/lectures/meet-gibbs-lect Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectures – No. 86, January 2013, San Diego, CA; Cédric Villani] Accessed on line 20 May 2015.
29. [https://www.ams.org/profession/prizes-awards/ams-prizes/doob-prize Joseph L. Doob Prize – Most Recent Prize: 2014] Accessed on line 20 May 2015.
30. [http://www.upmc.fr/en/research/talents_and_discoveries/scientific_awards_and_honors/2013/cedric_villani_elected_to_the_academy_of_science.html Cédric Villani, new member of the French Academy of Science] Accessed on line 20 May 2015.
31. (29 January 2020). "Newly discovered neon-green spider named after the 'Lady Gaga of mathematics'".
32. (22 January 2020). "On Araniella and Neoscona (Araneae, Araneidae) of the Caucasus, Middle East and Central Asia". ZooKeys.
33. (2010). "Book Review of ''Optimal transport: Old and new'' by Cédric Villani". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.
34. Gouvêa, Fernando Q.. (15 December 2013). "Review of ''Théorème Vivant'' by Cédric Villani".