Cédric Villani is a French mathematician born in 1973. He studied in Toulon at the Lycée Dumont-Urville and then joined a preparatory class at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He placed fourth in the entrance exam to the Ecole normale supérieure.
He wrote his thesis, which he defended in 1998, on the subject of “the mathematical theory of the Boltzmann equation”. From 2000 to 2002 he taught at the ENS of Lyon and then at the University of Lyon. He has held several visiting professorships in Atlanta, Berkley and Princeton.
From 2009 to 2017, Cédric Villani was director of the Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris.
His work on kinetic theory (Boltzmann and Vlasov equations, and their variants), and optimal transport and its applications has been rewarded by numerous distinctions:
- Louis Armand Prize 2001
- Peccot-Vimont Prize 2003
- Jacques Herbrand Grand Prize (2007)
- Fermat Prize (2009)
- Henri-Poincaré Prize (2009)
- Fields Medal (2010)
- Knight of the Legion of Honour (2011)
- François-Mauriac Prize (2013)
- Gibbs Lecture (2013)
- Joseph L. Doob Prize (2014)
In 2017, he was elected to the French Parliament with the “La République en marche” movement, representing Essonne from 2017 to 2022. After having lost his seat by just 19 votes in June 2022, Villani went back to the world of academia in September by taking up a professorship between the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (Université de Lyon).