Bristol Festival of Ideas: Cedric Villani

Cédric Villani

Birth of a Theorem: The Story of a Mathematical Adventure

Wed 11 March 2015, 18.00-19.00

Lecture Theatre 1, School of Chemistry on Cantocks Close, University of Bristol BS8 1TH

Tickets are free but booking is required.

What goes on inside the mind of a mathematician? Where does inspiration come from?

With a storyteller’s gift, mathematics genius Cedric Villani takes us on a mesmerising journey through the discovery of a new theorem. Along the way he encounters obstacles and setbacks, losses of faith and even brushes with madness. His story is one of courage and partnership, doubt and anxiety, elation and despair.

Blending science with history, biography with myth, Villani conjures up an inimitable cast of characters including the omnipresent Einstein, mad genius Kurt Godel, and Villani’s personal hero, John Nash. We discover how it feels to be obsessed by a theorem during your child’s cello practise and throughout your dreams, why appreciating maths is a bit like watching an episode of Columbo, and how sometimes inspiration only comes from locking yourself away in a dark room to think.

BIOGRAPHY

Cédric Villani is a French mathematician who has received many international awards for his work including the Prize of the European Mathematical Society, the Fermat Prize and the Henri Poincaré Prize. In 2010 he was awarded the Fields Medal, the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation. Often called ‘the mathematicians’ Nobel Prize’, it is viewed by some as the highest honour a mathematician can achieve. Cédric is a professor at Lyon University and Director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris.

This event is free but prebooking is required. You need to show your ticket at the door. Please be ready to take your place by 17.50 at the latest.

We have restricted the number of tickets that can be booked to one per transaction. This has been introduced in an effort to stop people automatically booking multiple tickets without confirming if they have guests to go with them. We hope this will help to limit the number of 'no shows' at the events, which currently run at around 35% of bookings. We will monitor the situation. If you need more than one ticket, you can click on the booking link again. The little extra effort involved will hopefully put off those who don’t really need more than one, but not those who do.

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