Margaret Harris reviews Birth of a Theorem by Cédric Villani
Between the early spring of 2008, when he began working on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation, and the summer of 2010, when he won a coveted Fields Medal for that work, the mathematician Cédric Villani was a very busy man. That much is clear from Birth of a Theorem, Villani’s personal and highly idiosyncratic account of this crucial period in his career. It is worth stating up front that this book breaks essentially all the rules of popular science and maths writing: whole pages of it are filled with equations and LaTeX notation that even most mathematicians won’t follow, while technical terms usually go undefined and famous colleagues pop in and out like lights on a firefly.
But Villani isn’t trying to explain his work; he’s trying to explain what it was like to do that work, and in this he succeeds brilliantly. The book is, essentially, an Impressionist portrait of a mathematician’s working life, and reading it is a mixture of zooming in to examine the brushstrokes and backing away to get the bigger picture. There is no single moment where everything clicks together, but it’s an immensely rewarding read, and it does, eventually, give readers a very good impression of what Villani’s Fields-Medal-winning work was all about, and why it matters.
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux £18.99/$26.00hb 272pp
