Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure (43 page)

TWELVE

I’ll take care of the little lambkins:
The pet name in French is
poutchou
,
thought to be a shortened form of the expression
petit bout de chou
(literally, a tiny cabbage) and used affectionately to mean a “little darling.” It may be related to
pitchoun
,
the Provençal word for “little” or “little one.”

SIXTEEN

There was even some Rove:
A cheese made from the milk of a rare breed of goat, originally raised in the village of this name in the south of France, near Marseille.

From the mission statement of the Institut Henri Poincaré:
Drafted by its new director in September 2010.

SEVENTEEN

My heart will conquer without striking a blow
:
“Mon cœur vaincra sans coup férir.” From Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “L’espionne,” in
Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre
(1918).

TWENTY

the phenomenal Greek mathematician Demetri Christodoulou:
Here, as in many other places, if a mathematician is referred to by his nickname rather than his given name, it is because the author knows him personally or because everyone calls him by his nickname. In this case both things are true.

(not on a level with Desplechin):
Filbet is referring here to the film director Arnaud Desplechin, whose 2008 film
Un conte de Noël
Villani worked on with Wendelin Werner, helping to write a scene involving mathematical calculations.

TWENTY-ONE

Sleep, little wonders, tomorrow day will dawn
:
“Dormez petites merveilles, il fera jour demain”—from the lullaby that the bird sings to his children in the animated cartoon
Le Roi et l’Oiseau.

TWENTY-TWO

the famous Shanghai ranking:
More formally known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), published each year by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

“Every mathematician worthy of the name…”:
From André Weil’s memoir
The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician
,
translated by Jennifer Gage (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1992), 91.

TWENTY-FIVE

the day of fishes and fools:
An April fool is known in France as a
poisson d’avril.

watched an episode of
Lady Oscar
:
The animated French version of Riyoko Ikeda’s popular manga
Berusaiyu no Bara
(The Rose of Versailles).

Gribouille singing “Le Marin et la Rose”:
The French singer Marie-France Gaîté, who performed under the name Gribouille, died at a tragically young age in 1968. The video mentioned here can be found at
www.youtube.com/watch?v
=
HmGz-9Ha0MY
.

“THE SAILOR AND THE ROSE”:
Translation of “Le Marin et la Rose” (lyrics and arrangement by Jean-Marie Huard).

TWENTY-SEVEN

for his spectacular solution of a long-standing problem called the Fundamental Lemma:
Ngô had solved the problem for the case of unitary groups in 2004, and then four years later extended the proof to include Lie algebras. By the end of 2009, even readers of
Time
magazine knew who he was.

as Sigal recommended:
Michael Sigal, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, was a fellow visitor at the IAS for the Spring 2009 term.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The tragic Danielle Messia, the forsaken one:
Villani is thinking here of the hauntingly beautiful song “Pourquoi tu m’as abandonnée?,” addressed to an absent father. Messia’s music was obsessed with misfortune. She herself died from leukemia while still in her twenties, and has been mostly forgotten since.

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.

I
NSTITUTE FOR
M
ATHEMATICS AND
M
ECHANICS
:
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.