Cédric Villani – författare

This book provides an overview of the role of AI in medicine and, more generally, of issues at the intersection of mathematics, informatics, and medicine. It is intended for AI experts, offering them a valuable retrospective and a global vision for the future, as well as for non-experts who are curious about this timely and important subject. Its goal is to provide clear, objective, and reasonable information on the issues covered, avoiding any fantasies that the topic “AI” might evoke. In addition, the book seeks to provide a broad kaleidoscopic perspective, rather than deep technical details.

Leading researchers in the field of Optimal Transportation, with different views and perspectives, contribute to this Summer School volume: Monge-Ampère and Monge-Kantorovich theory, shape optimization and mass transportation are linked, among others, to applications in fluid mechanics granular material physics and statistical mechanics, emphasizing the attractiveness of the subject from both a theoretical and applied point of view.

The volume is designed to become a guide to researchers willing to enter into this challenging and useful theory.

At the close of the 1980s, the independent contributions of Yann Brenier, Mike Cullen and John Mather launched a revolution in the venerable field of optimal transport founded by G. Monge in the 18th century, which has made breathtaking forays into various other domains of mathematics ever since. The author presents a broad overview of this area, supplying complete and self-contained proofs of all the fundamental results of the theory of optimal transport at the appropriate level of generality. Thus, the book encompasses the broad spectrum ranging from basic theory to the most recent research results.

PhD students or researchers can read the entire book without any prior knowledge of the field. A comprehensive bibliography with notes that extensively discuss the existing literature underlines the book’s value as a most welcome reference text on this subject.

Entropy and entropy production have recently become mathematical tools for kinetic and hydrodynamic limits, when deriving the macroscopic behaviour of systems from the interaction dynamics of their many microscopic elementary constituents at the atomic or molecular level.

During a special semester on Hydrodynamic Limits at the Centre Émile Borel in Paris, 2001 two of the research courses were held by C. Villani and F. Rezakhanlou. Both illustrate the major role of entropy and entropy production in a mutual and complementary manner and have been written up and updated for joint publication. Villani describes the mathematical theory of convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation and its relation to various problems and fields, including information theory, logarithmic Sobolev inequalities and fluid mechanics. Rezakhanlou discusses four conjectures for the kinetic behaviour of the hard sphere models and formulates four stochastic variations of this model, also reviewing known results for these.

This book challenges the views put forward by Pierre Cartier, one of the anchors of the famous Bourbaki group, and Cédric Villani, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who received the Fields Medal in 2010. Jean Dhombres, mathematician and science historian, and Gerhard Heinzmann, philosopher of science and also a specialist in mathematics engage in a fruitful dialogue with the two mathematicians, prompting readers to reflect on mathematical activity and its social consequences in history as well as in the modern world. Cédric Villani’s popular success proves once again that a common awareness has developed, albeit in a very confused way, of the major role of mathematics in the construction and efficiency of natural sciences, which are at the origin of our technologies. Despite this, the idea that mathematics cannot be shared remains firmly entrenched, a perceived failing that has even been branded a lack of culture by vocal forces in the media as well as cultural and political establishment. 

The authors explore three major directions in their dialogue: the highly complex relationship between mathematics and reality, the subject of many debates and opposing viewpoints; the freedom that the construction of mathematics has given humankind by enabling them to develop the natural sciences as well as mathematical research; and the responsibility with which the scientific community and governments should address the role of mathematics in research and education policies.