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La Lettre
© B.Eymann - Académie des sciences
Cédric Villani
Member of theAcadémie des Sciences, Professor at the University
Claude-Bernard Lyon 1, Director of the Institut Henri-Poincaré
(UPMC, CNRS), Paris
It was in a state of mathematical frenzy that theAcadémie
des Sciences was founded in 1666. The movement of
Greek science rediscovery was still recent; for instance,
the translation of the writings of Diophantus, “the father
of algebra”, was achieved hardly forty years earlier. A
generation of bold and prolix mathematicians had just
passed away, yet an extraordinary one was preparing to
take over in the four corners of Europe.
Gone were Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Fermat: they had laid the foundations for the theory of numbers
and analysis, built bridges between geometry and algebra, initiated the calculus of probability and of
variations, deciphered the laws of optics and acoustics and even built the first calculating machines. In
each and everyone of them, there was this double movement of mathematical ideas: towards the inside,
on the one hand, with the study of mathematical concepts and objects in themselves, and towards the
outside, on the other hand, in a perpetual struggle to describe, understand and predict the phenomena of
nature – as a matter of fact, of physics.
Those who were about to follow the steps of these giants would not be less bright. At the University
of Cambridge, a student named Isaac Newton was making the best impression: influenced by Wallis
and Barrow, he had also read Fermat and Descartes with enthusiasm. Forced out of class by a plague
epidemic, he worked on – among other topics – a new theory of gravitation. A somewhat younger student
from Leipzig, Gottfried Leibniz, had just become Doctor of law; he refused a teaching position to continue
the intellectual exploration that would make him one of the most universal spirits of his times. In Basel, a rich
merchant, Nicolaus Bernoulli, was raising his son Jacob in the hope that he would take the family business
over, far from suspecting he would become the first of the most famous dynasty of mathematicians ever.
Now, at the time, in Paris, the most acclaimed mathematician was the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens, who
was in his thirties and had been educated at The Hague, Paris and London. His work on the pendulum
Mathematics:
to understand and predict