Quote
"If paparazzi specialized in mathematical celebrities theyd camp outside the dining hall at the IAS and come away with a new batch of pictures every day."

Cédric Villani
Cédric Villani
Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani 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.
"If paparazzi specialized in mathematical celebrities theyd camp outside the dining hall at the IAS and come away with a new batch of pictures every day."
"When you are into mathematics, you have been so high on the scale of complexity of reasoning that you are living in some kind of altered reality. You think everybody on the street is able to understand complicated reasoning [...]. And you get very frustrated, when you discover thats not the case."
"In some situations however, when you are deeply with your problem, you feel at home anywhere just thinking about your problem. Some of my best work was done in hotels, on the train, and theres no rule. More important when you think is what goes on inside rather outside. [...] The best thoughts can be nearly everywhere."