Villani has been called the Lady Gaga of French mathematicians. After winning the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, in 2010, for what his award citation called “proofs of nonlinear Landau damping and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation,” he embraced a role that many other medalists have dreaded—that of mathematical ambassador, hopscotching from event to event and continent to continent, evangelizing for the discipline. “We are the most hidden of all fields,” he told me. “We are the ones who typically interact the least with the outer world. We are also the field which is most emblematic of revulsion in school.” The French filmmaker Olivier Peyon, who first met Villani while shooting his 2013 documentary “Comment J’ai Détesté les Maths” (“How I Came to Hate Math”), says that the mathematician struck him immediately as a natural proselytizer. “He was funny, very—in French, we say pédagogique,” Peyon told me. “He knew how to speak about his art, about math.” (In the film, Villani delights in the absurd number of people who claim to have been last in their math classes. “How could so many be last?” he asks with mock surprise.)
at this guy dressing like we're in the XIXth century