Cédric Villani

Cédric Villani is a French mathematician and politician, born in 1973, who works primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics. He received his doctorate at Paris Dauphine University in 1998 under the supervision of Pierre-Louis Lions and became a professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon in 2000. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010 for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation, and he directed the Institut Henri Poincare from 2009 to 2017. He proved the so-called Cercignani's conjecture, described the research behind it in the book Théorème vivant, and was elected to the French National Assembly for Essonne in 2017, losing the seat in 2022.