Birth of a Theorem

A mathematician’s humorous and charming personal account of his eighteen-month journey to winning the Fields Medal. Winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction Cédric Villani—the Lady Gaga of mathematics, as he has been called—was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal in recognition of a proof he and his former student Clément Mouhot devised to explain one of the most baffling phenomena in contemporary physics. In Birth of a Theorem , Villani evokes the highly persona