Professor Cédric Villani is a French mathematician and recipient of the 2010 Fields Medal for his work on differential equations. He was born in 1973 in France and studied mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, from 1992 to 1996 and spent four more years as assistant Professor there.
In 1998, Villani defended his PhD on the Mathematical Theory of the Boltzmann Equation. From 2000 to 2010, Villani was Professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and now at the Université de Lyon. He has occupied visiting Professor positions in Atlanta, Berkeley and Princeton. In 2009, he took over the management of the Henri Poincaré Institute which is one of the oldest research institutes in the world in mathematics and theoretical physics.
Villani has received several national and international prizes for his research, in particular the Fields Medal, awarded at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad (India), by the President of India. Since receiving the prestigious award, Villani has served as a spokesperson for the French mathematical community in media and political circles.
Villani’s main research interests are in kinetic theory (Boltzmann and Vlasov equations and their variants), and Optimal Transport and its applications, a field in which he has written the two reference books: Topics in Optimal Transportation (2003); Optimal Transport, old and new (2008). More generally, Villani is fond of subjects which combine several (if not all) of the following themes: evolution partial differential equations, fluid mechanics, statistical mechanics, probability theory, smooth and nonsmooth “metric” Riemannian geometry, and functional inequalities with geometric content.
Villani belongs to the editorial boards of Inventiones Mathematicae, the Journal of Functional Analysis (JFA), the Journal of Mathematical Physics (JMP) and the *Journal of Statistical Physics (JSP). He also serves as an administrator for several associations, in particular the pro-European Think-Tank EuropaNova.
He has been a Member of Parliament for Essonne since June 2017 and sits on the Law Commission. He also chairs the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices (OPECST) of the National Assembly and the Senate in France.