Math & Cultural

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute presents

Cédric Villani: Of triangles, gas, prices and men

Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 5:15-6:45pm

MSRI, 17 Gauss Way, Berkeley, CA

This talk is the story of an encounter of three distinct fields: non-Euclidean geometry, gas dynamics and economics. Some of the most fundamental mathematical tools behind these theories appear to have a close connection, which was revealed around the turn of the 21st century, and has developed strikingly since then.

Event schedule

5:15-5:45pm- Light reception with food and drinks in MSRI's Atrium

5:45-6:45pm- Lecture in MSRI's Simons Auditorium

This event is free and open to the public.

Speaker Biography

Born in 1973 in France, Cédric Villani studied mathematics in École Normale Supérieure in Paris, from 1992 to 1996, and spent four more years as assistant professor there.

In 1998 he defended his PhD on the mathematical theory of the Boltzmann equation. Besides his advisor Pierre-Louis Lions (Paris, France), he was much influenced by Yann Brenier (Nice, France), Eric Carlen (Rutgers, USA) and Michel Ledoux (Toulouse, France).

From 2000 to 2010 he was professor at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and now at the Université de Lyon. He occupied visiting professor positions in Atlanta, Berkeley and Princeton.

Since 2009 he is director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris; this 80-year old national institute, dedicated to welcoming visiting researchers, is at the very heart of French mathematics.

His work has won him many national and international prizes, in particular the Fields Medal, usually regarded as the most prestigious award in mathematics, which was given to him at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad (India), by the President of India. His book “Theoreme vivant” retraces the genesis of the development of the theorem of Landau damping for which he was awarded the Fields Medal.

Since then he has served as a spokesperson for the french mathematical community in media and political circles.

His 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 wrote the two reference books: Topics in Optimal Transportation (2003); Optimal Transport, old and new (2008). More generally, he 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
• Functional inequalities with geometric content.

He 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 is President of the Scientific Board of the panafrican institute AIMS-Senegal.