Leçons de mathématique joyeuse

by Cédric Villani, Cassia Sakarovitch

416 pages, Paperback

Published November 6, 2025

About the author

Cédric Villani is a French mathematician who has received many international awards for his work including the Jacques Herbrand Prize, 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 awarded every four years and is viewed by some as the highest honour a mathematician can achieve.

He is a professor at Lyon University and Director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, working primarily on partial differential equations and mathematical physics.

Reviews

[Fernando Pestana da Costa · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a splendid book! In eight "lessons", the famous mathematician Cédric Villani take us in a journey through mathematics, not as dead History, but as it is done: as a lively research activity, in its relation with applications (mainly Physics and Astronomy, but also Economics) and in its interaction among its diverse disciplines (Analysis, Geometry, Algebra, Probability, Number Theory, etc.). Exploring stories in many areas, most of them dear to Villani interests and to which he has contributed great original results (partial differential equations in the contexts of stability issues in celestial dynamics, Boltzmann equations, or optimal transport), the book is illustrated with a plethora of schemes and drawings, and contains anecdots about many famous mathematicians and physicists of the past (Boltzmann, Gauss, Kantorovich, Nash, Poincaré, Riemann, and more). It is a delight to read even if you are not a mathematician, in spite of some equations showing up here and there, the understanding of which is not really required for the book's enjoyement.