Cedric Villani

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

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

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

Since 2009 I am 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.

I received several national and international prizes for my research, in particular the Fields Medal,awarded at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad (India), by the President of India. Since then I has served as a spokesperson for the french mathematical community in media and political circles.

My main research interests are in kinetic theory (Boltzmann and Vlasov equations and their variants), and optimal transport and its applications, a field in which I wrote the two reference books: Topics in Optimal Transportation (2003); Optimal Transport, old and new (2008).