Mathematician Cédric Villani at the inauguration of A.Y. 2017/18
Rector Francesco Ubertini will inaugurate the University of Bologna's 930th academic year in the presence of the winner of the Fields Medal, the highest honour a mathematician can receive. The Doctor Dixie Jazz Band will close the inauguration ceremony.
The inauguration of the University of Bologna's 930th academic year will take place on Friday 24 November, at 16.30, in the Aula Magna of Santa Lucia. Cédric Villani, winner of the Fields Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, has been invited to the event.
Cédric Villani is a French mathematician, director of the Institut Henri-Poincaré since 2009 and winner of the prestigious award, which was assigned to him, in 2010, by the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Hyderabad (India). After studying mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was appointed an assistant professor, he obtained his PhD at the Paris Dauphine University. He has been a professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and today is a professor at the University of Lyon. He has worked mainly on the kinetic theory (Boltzmann and Vlasov equations and their variations), the theory of optimal transport and its applications to differential geometry and the theory of partial differential equations involved in statistical mechanics.
The Rector's speech, which will open the ceremony, will be followed by the interventions of a student representative and a technical and administrative staff representative. After this, Cédric Villani's lesson and the final music contribution by the Doctor Dixie Jazz Band.