Prof. Cedric Villani
Professor of Mathematics, Lyon University and Director of the Henri Poincaré Institute, Paris, France
Professor Villani, member of the French Academy of Sciences, has been honored with several national and international prizes for his research, in particular the Fields Medal, awarded at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad (India), by the President of India. Since then he has served as a spokesperson for the French mathematical community in media and political circles. His main research interests are in kinetic theory (Boltzmann and Vlasov equations and their variants), and optimal transport and its applications, a field in which he wrote the two main reference books: Topics in Optimal Transportation (2003); Optimal Transport, old and new (2008). He is a part of the editorial boards of Inventiones Mathematicae, the Journal of Functional Analysis (JFA), among others. He serves on many national and international scientific boards, including the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Commission and the one of the panafrican institute AIMS. He also serves as an administrator for several associations, in particular the pro-European Think-Tank EuropaNova.