spent part of his days devouring Carmen Cru: A series of comic books by Jean-Marc Lelong, published in seven volumes between 1981 and 2001, about a cantankerous old woman living alone in the countryside after the war, cut off from society. A final volume appeared after Lelong’s death in 2004.
Jean Ferrat’s “Les Poètes”: Based on Louis Aragon’s long poem of the same name.
an army captain: “le vieux con”—the big fool, in Pete Seeger’s original lyrics. Allwright recorded a French version of Seeger’s 1967 antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” the following year.
“HOLIDAY”: Translation of “Jour de Fête” (lyrics by Catherine Ribeiro/arrangement by Christian Taurines).
The photograph of Ribeiro that appears beneath the lyrics hangs on the wall behind Villani’s office desk in Paris. The inscription reads: Je brûlerai jusqu’à extinction des feux (I will burn until the fires burn out).
TWENTY-NINE
a challenge contemptuously issued by Warren Ambrose: A distinguished geometer who spent his entire career at MIT, Ambrose deeply resented the verbal abuse heaped on him by an untenured professor almost fifteen years his junior. One day he angrily lashed out at Nash: “If you’re so good, why don’t you solve the embedding problem for manifolds?” When Nash succeeded (“I did this because of a bet,” as he famously said), Ambrose was the first to congratulate him.
the biography by Sylvia Nasar: Nasar’s book, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), is the source for the previous note and a number of other details concerning Nash’s life and work.
an office in an old factory building just off Washington Square: The imposing and austere concrete tower that has long been the institute’s home at New York University, at 251 Mercer Street, was not built until almost a decade later. The original offices were in a nine-story building at the corner of Waverly Place and Greene Street occupied by hat factories and, on the ground floor, the giant computer being built by the Atomic Energy Commission.
INSTITUTE FOR MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS: Renamed the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences after its founder, the German-born mathematician Richard Courant, in 1964.
THIRTY-ONE
mille pompons!: A favorite expression of Fantômette, the costumed, crime-fighting heroine of a series of very popular children’s books by Georges Chaulet. It may or may not have anything to do with the fact that Fantômette wears a snug black bonnet with a woolen ball or bobble (a pompon, in French) at the end of its long tail.
like the pedestrian in Ray Bradbury’s story: The reference is to Bradbury’s 1951 story “The Pedestrian,” illuminated in its opening scene by “the faintest glimmers of firefly light.”
counties or states or countries that are divided into noncontiguous parts: In the United States, for example, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is separated from the lower part of the state by two of the Great Lakes, Michigan and Huron.
the research being conducted by an INRIA team: the French acronym stands for Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control).
“A word that goes against…”: Translation of an excerpt from “La Tour de Babel” (lyrics and arrangement by Guy Béart).
THIRTY-FOUR
Messia’s song, Mairowitz’s biography of Kafka: Danielle Messia pays tribute to Prague’s revolutionary past in her 1982 song “Avant-guerre.” David Zane Mairowitz’s Introducing Kafka was first published in 1996, with illustrations by R. Crumb.
THIRTY-SIX
From my 2010 Luminy Summer School lecture notes: The reference is to the summer school held every year at the International Center for Mathematical Meetings on the Luminy campus of the Université d’Aix-Marseille.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Re: Resubmission to Acta Mathematica: With only a few very minor modifications, the letter that follows is the one Villani himself wrote in English.
THIRTY-NINE
one of them the first research monograph I ever read: Cercignani’s Theory and Application of the Boltzmann Equation first appeared with Elsevier in 1975.
FORTY
Miyazaki’s Nausicaä before the soldiers of the royal house of Pejite: Nausicaä, princess of the Valley of the Wind, is the title character of the manga series and anime film created by Hayao Miyazaki.
Baudoin’s magnificent Salade Niçoise: A graphic novel published by the French artist and illustrator Edmond Baudoin in 1999.
“Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know”: Schatzman was quoting an aphorism usually attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi (Lao Tzu).
FORTY-ONE
the RER: Short for Réseau Express Régional, a system of five express train lines connecting the center of Paris with outlying suburbs.
FORTY-TWO
Fermat’s famous complaint about the margin that was too narrow: In 1637, Fermat wrote in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica that it was too narrow to contain his proof of an adjacent conjecture about positive integers. The problem resisted solution for more than three centuries, until Andrew Wiles finally succeeded in 1995.
Ages and ages passed: “Les temps et les temps passèrent”—a line from Catherine Ribeiro’s song “L’Oiseau devant la porte.”
Thurston was a visionary: The present tense used in the French edition has been converted here to past since Thurston died in August 2012, just before the book was first published.
chosen by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000: Founded by the American businessman Landon Clay and his wife, Lavinia, the institute sought to concentrate attention on some of the most difficult, and potentially the most rewarding, mathematical challenges of the twenty-first century.
Alexandrov, Burago, Gromov: Perelman studied with Alexander Danilovich Alexandrov at Leningrad State University and with Yuri Burago at the Leningrad branch of the Steklov Mathematics Institute in the 1980s; in 1991–92 he worked under Mikhail Gromov as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques outside Paris.
the so-called soul conjecture: An outstanding problem of Riemannian geometry first posed by Jeff Cheeger and Detlef Gromoll some twenty years earlier.
FORTY-THREE
number 333 of the one thousand scientists photographed by Maraval: As part of the exhibition 1000 chercheurs parlent d’avenir, a video mosaic of faces and words was projected on the walls of the Panthéon in Paris during the week of October 18–24, 2010. A simultaneously published book version is available from www.maraval.org.
Namaste: The traditional Indian greeting (literally, “I bow to you”), spoken with hands pressed together.
eleven of the fifty-two Fields Medal winners: The number usually given is ten, but Villani includes Grothendieck, who, though not a French citizen (technically, in 1966, he was a stateless person), received all of his mathematical training in France and worked there for the whole of the time during which he was professionally active. (In 2014, a Fields Medal was awarded to the young Franco-Brazilian mathematician Artur Avila, bringing the total number to twelve.)
a cup of masala chai: The highly spiced local tea, found in one form or another throughout India and southern Asia.
My contribution to the Korean edition of Les déchiffreurs: A volume of photographs and essays edited by Jean-François Dars, Annick Lesne, and Anne Papillault, originally published in France by Belin in 2008 and subsequently translated into English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The English version given here is new.
TYGER PHENOMENON FOR THE GALERKIN-TRUNCATED BURGERS AND EULER EQUATIONS: This is the title of the talk given by Frisch at an international conference summarizing the results of a paper subsequently published in Physical Review E 84, 016301 (2011) as “Resonance phenomenon for the Galerkin-truncated Burgers and Euler equations.” The text that follows is the abstract of the published article.
FORTY-FOUR
My appearance with Franck Dubosc: A popular comedian in France kno
wn for his vulgar humor.
I’d already done an interview with RTL: Radio Luxembourg, an out-of-country commercial station (originally Radio Télévision Luxembourg) with studios in Paris.
recorded a show for Des Mots de Minuit: A literary program on late-night French television.
Hasta que el cuerpo aguante!: “Until the body gives out!”—a line from a song of the same title by the French songwriter and performer Dominique Ané (better known as Dominique A).
the moment we became aware of his scientific background: Bernard Accoyer, president of the National Assembly from 2007 to 2012, was trained as a physician.
just before question time got under way: A lively, sometimes raucous, weekly session during which the government’s ministers are submitted to questioning by members of the Assembly; a cousin to Prime Minister’s Questions in Great Britain.
the majesty of these extraordinary oversized volumes: Twenty-three monumental volumes appeared between 1809 and 1828, containing eight hundred thirty-seven engravings in all, many of them larger than any such previous reproductions—and this despite the loss of the expedition’s equipment with the sinking of its research vessel near Alexandria in 1798.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cédric Villani is the director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris and a professor of mathematics at the Université de Lyon. His work on partial differential equations and various topics in mathematical physics has been honored by a number of awards, including the Fermat Prize and the Henri Poincaré Prize. He received the Fields Medal in 2010 for results concerning Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Malcolm DeBevoise’s translations, from the French and Italian, including more than thirty works in every branch of scholarship, have been widely praised. He lives in New Orleans. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue. Budapest, February 24, 2011
A Note on the Translation
Notes
A Note About the Author and a Note About the Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle
Translation and note on the translation copyright © 2015 by Malcolm DeBevoise
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2012 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, France, as Théorème vivant
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint illustrations and lyrics from the following previously published material: Photograph of Gribouille copyright © Jean-Pierre Leloir, reproduced by permission of Archives Leloir. Diagrams here copyright © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, used with kind permission of Springer Science+Business Media. “Le Marin et la Rose,” lyrics by Jean Huard, music by Claude Pingault, copyright © 1960 Les Éditions Transatlantiques—rights transferred to Première Music Group. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Villani, Cédric, 1973–
[Théorème vivant. English]
Birth of a theorem: a mathematical adventure / Cédric Villani; illustrations by Claude Gondard. — First American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-86547-767-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71023-1 (e-book)
1. Villani, Cédric, 1973– 2. Mathematicians—France—Biography. I. Title.
QA29.V54 A3 2015
510.92—dc23
[B]
2014031268
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Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure Page 21
