Cedric Villani is a French mathematician who has received many international awards for his work including the Jacques Herbrand Prize, the Prize of the European Mathematical Society, the Fermat Prize and the Henri Poincare Prize.
In 2010 he was awarded the Fields Medal, the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation. Often called 'the mathematicians' Nobel Prize', it is awarded every four years and is viewed by some as the highest honour a mathematician can achieve.
He is a professor at Lyon University and Director of the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris, working primarily on partial differential equations and mathematical physics.