Cédric Villani

Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani (French: [se.dʁik pa.tʁis tje.ʁi vi.la.ni]; born 5 October 1973) 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 the one of the mathematician 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 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).