Public Lecture

Can one predict the future arrangements of planets over extremely large time periods? For centuries this issue has triggered dreams of curious people, and hot debates by specialists including Newton, Lagrange, Poincare, Kolmogorov, Laskar, and Tremaine. Villani will explore the long time behavior of a plasma, evoking the advances which he made with Mouhot a few years ago, and continuing with the subject of long time stability for incompressible fluids. Common themes will appear in all these various fields, and will be the opportunity for a wide audience to appreciate both old and new results of mathematical research.