Fields Medalist Cédric Villani to Give Public Lecture at Institute for Advanced Study

Cédric Villani, Professor at Université Lyon and Director of the Institut Henri Poincaré, will give a public lecture, “Of Particles, Stars and Eternity,” which will take place Tuesday, April 14, at 5:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus. A former Member (2009) in the School of Mathematics, Villani called his stay at the Institute one of his most productive periods, in which he wrote more than two hundred and fifty pages of mathematical research papers, which is detailed in his book Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure, translated by Malcolm DeBevoise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). The Institute will partner with local bookstore Labyrinth Books to make copies of Birth of Theorem available at the event. Villani will host a book signing following the lecture.

Villani’s research interest is kinetic theory and optimal transport and its applications. In this lecture, Villani will explore the ability to predict arrangements of planets over extremely long periods and why this idea has been debated for centuries by Newton, Lagrange, Kolmogorov, Laskar and Tremaine. He will also discuss the behavior of plasma and stability of incompressible fluids.

In 2010, Villani was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, regarded as the highest honor in mathematics, for his proofs of nonlinear Landau damping and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation. His other honors and awards include the Fermat Prize, the Henri Poincaré Prize of the International Association of Mathematical Physics, the Prize of the European Mathematical Society and the Jacques Herbrand Prize of the Academy of Sciences.

Villani received his Ph.D. from École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1998 where he subsequently was a Professor from 2000­–10. He has also held professorships at the University of Berkeley and the Georgia Tech Institute.

For more information on this and other lectures at the Institute, visit www.ias.edu/events.