What's so sexy about math? | Cédric Villani

Hidden truths permeate our world; they're inaccessible to our senses, but math allows us to go beyond our intuition to uncover their mysteries. In this survey of mathematical breakthroughs, Fields Medal winner Cédric Villani speaks to the thrill of discovery and details the sometimes perplexing life of a mathematician. "Beautiful mathematical explanations are not only for our pleasure," he says. "They change our vision of the world."

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[orinpemulus]

He tells them he got the fields metal and no one claps. Jeez, that's one tough crowd.

[tangiblefeeling]

It's a shame that english people find it so entertaining to mock french people speaking in English with an accent when their english is probably worse than this man. His words are well structured, it sounds appealing and even when he speaks in French, the way he uses his words.... It's beautiful.

[musicjunkie]

To all the people complaining about his clothes and his accent: If you cannot focus on the message because you're too busy judging the mannerisms and appearances of the person delivering it, you're going to miss out on a lot in life. I get that his job includes sounding and looking as pleasing as possible, but not everyone with important things to say will appeal to you. If you're able to get rid of your prejudices and keep an open mind to what they're trying to say, you may just pick up something you did not know.

[dunnyt]

I love watching people like this talk. So much passion

[arasharfa]

- What's so sexy about math?
- Cedric Villani!

[lksdjflksj]

Probably one of the most incredible mathematicians of this century

[scowell]

Just love Cedric... he's old school. An authentic renaissance dude.

[notreal]

11:46 "1973 - obviously alive"
i love him so much

[SilverMiraii]

I like it when you work on a problem like a physics problem which obviously involves a lot of math as well, calculus, geometry, trig, algebra of course. And you get complicated with it, pages upon pages, and you need to keep track of everything, not to make a careless mistake, you go back and forward, look for things to substitute with other things, find relationships, manipulate equations until you solve for a thing, but you have too many unknowns so you manipulate this and that and substitute thins into that and all kinds of convoluted things, it's ugly. But then you feel like you're close to an answer, and boom, you get a simple, beautiful answer. Maybe you get an equation that makes everything make sense, and that you got from all this convoluted weirdness, the logical ideas you've learned in math, but once you applied them and were very careful all of the sudden it makes you understand a concept that otherwise would not make sense to you, it makes concepts in nature have intuitive sense, which you would otherwise not understand.
This is why I like math, this is why I like physics.

One advice I have to people who wanna learn math, physics, chemistry, or other sciences involving math, do not learn the formulas like poetry, understand the formulas, then you can make your own formulas. Mathematics is a way of thinking rather than formulas, sure, it's nice to have a formula worked by someone else, they did all the hard work, and here you have a simple thing you can apply and get your answer, like the quadratic formula, but if you actually derive it yourself, not only you get the satisfaction, but you get the understanding of it, an intuition, the logic behind it, math is all about logic, don't memorize formulas without understanding them, deriving and looking at proofs

[enigma]

Villani had got to be the most inspirational mathematician around today, not to mention one of the absolute best.

[matbob_]

My heart beat accelerated and I became emotional at the hearing of "Take the second term to the other side, Fourier transform and invert in L2"...

[alexdurand]

À quel moment vous vous permettez de critiquer son accent alors que son Anglais, sa prononciation et sa fluidité est vraiment très bonne.
Respectez cette grande personne.

[loadinganimation]

when you hear that voice in your head "take the second term to the other side, Fourier transform and invert in L2"

[cptn_nm]

Plus qu’un mathématicien ou qu’un maître de conférence, un génie d’une modestie incroyable, Monsieur Villani est capable de transmettre une passion, de transmettre l’amour pour les mathématiques. C’est ce qui fait de lui mon idole

[valoraz]

Excellent talk, my greatest regret is failing to understand that mathematics is about concepts and not calculations when I was younger

[shadmansudipto]

Its cool how much passion this guy has

[Paul-oiwz]

This is the most French man ever seen.

[rareroe]

I love this guy. It's like learning from a chill Bond villain.

[pvtkns]

i loves how people talks about something they loves. you can see in her/his ways of talking enthusiastically, also in her/his burning eyes :) it reminds me that there are still good and positivity in this world and forget about negativity at a moment :)

[viktoriadevenyik]

He's such a good lecturer, clean and interesting thoughts with enthuasism, I wish he was my Maths lecturer.