Mathematician, Professor of Université de Lyon, Director of Institut Henri Poincaré

Cédric Villani was born in 1973 in France. He studied mathematics in École Normale Supérieure in Paris, from 1992 to 1996, and spent four more years as assistant professor there. In 1998 Cédric 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 Cédric 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 Cédric has been the director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris; this 80-year old national institute, dedicated to welcoming visiting researchers, is at the heart of french mathematics.
Cédric Villani 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 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).
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.
(This bio was borrowed from Mr. Cédric Villani's website: http://cedricvillani.org, copyright © Cédric Villani)

Articles from this author

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  Recommended / 2016-06-14

  Cédric Villani: the leadership of a science leader

  Cédric Villani / Mathematician, Professor of Université de Lyon, Director of Institut Henri Poincaré

  “French mathematician,” “one of the 21st century’s great mathematical minds” and “Fields Medal laureate,” would those titles be enough to satisfy him?