About Cédric Villani
Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani (French: [sedʁik patʁis tjeʁi vilani]; born 5 October 1973) is a French mathematician and politician working primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010, and he was the director of Sorbonne University's Institut Henri Poincaré from 2009 to 2017. As of September 2025, he is a professor at the École normale supérieure de Rennes. Villani has given two lectures at the Royal Institution, the first titled 'Birth of a Theorem'. The English translation of his book Théorème vivant (Living Theorem) has the same title. In the book he describes the links between his research on kinetic theory and that of the mathematician Carlo Cercignani. Villani, in fact, proved the so-called Cercignani's conjecture. His second lecture at the Royal Institution is titled 'The Extraordinary Theorems of John Nash'. Villani was elected as the deputy for Essonne's 5th constituency in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, during the 2017 legislative election. He was elected as a member of La République En Marche! (LREM), but in May 2020 left the party to form a new party, Ecology, Democracy, Solidarity (EDS). Following the dissolution of EDS, Villani joined Ecology Generation, and ran for re-election in 2022 under the banner of the NUPES, ultimately losing his seat to LREM candidate Paul Midy by 19 votes. He was elected vice president of the French Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices in July 2017. In the first round of voting, Villani obtained 47% of the vote and was thus strongly placed for the second round which he won with 69.36% of the vote.
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