Link: Fields Medalist Cédric Villani elected to the French parliament, Q+A for *Science*

Pain, Elisabeth: “Q&A: Why a top mathematician has joined Emmanuel Macron’s revolution”, Science, Jun. 19, 2017.

Who is Villani, anyway? …

Villani on Wikipedia.

(Oh, that guy. I have seen that pictures of that amazing cravat somewhere before … he won Fields medal in 2010, maybe it was in news then?)

His homepage contains outline of his research. Are you like me and barely know what “Ricci curvature” and “optimal transport” might mean? You are in luck, Villani explains some ideas in a way that (after furious head-scratching) you think you sort-of-maybe understand something (or at least are > 51 % confident that you misunderstand things that are at least close enough to the correct topic)…

… if you have passing familiarity with analysis and PDE terminology and/or you are prepared to spend an hour searching for things like

• Boltzmann equation

• Fourier transform

• Parseval’s theorem

• Evolution equation

• Maxwell distribution

• Sobolev inequalities.

Congratulations to French? Our MPs are famous for other kind of things.