France voted Sunday in the 1st round of parliamentary elections predicted to give Emmanuel Macron’s party a majority. The president’s centrists have given the ticket to a number of political novices—one of them has been called a ‘math evangelist’ and the ‘Lady Gaga of French maths’
Lady Gaga of French Maths
Cedric Villani, known for his unique dress sense including large spider brooches, won the Fields Medal in 2010 and has now “embraced a role that many other medallists have dreaded—that of mathematical ambassador,” writes Thomas Lin in The New Yorker
Tougher than a Nobel, better than sex!
The Fields Medal, called the Nobel Prize of mathematics, is rarer than the Nobel and is awarded once every four years. What did he get the prize for? In the perfect world of plasma (crowd of electrons), there are no collisions … “But still, if you slightly perturb a plasma equilibrium, you will find that the resulting electric field spontaneously vanishes, as if by some mysterious friction force,” he narrates in the TED talk. Villani found the answer to this mystery