Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure (44 page)

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Authors: Cédric Villani

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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 known 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

Epilogue. Budapest, February 24, 2011

A Note on the Translation

Notes

A Note About the Author and a Note About the Translator

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

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.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Villani, Cédric, 1973–