Free Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cédric Villani

language, and claim to come from a place called Hungary.
    Nash, on the other hand, is American through and through, from an old Protestant family. What is more, there was nothing in his ancestry that foretold an exceptional destiny for him. And yet a destiny depends on so many things! The intermingling of genes, the cross-fertilization of ideas, experiences, and chance encounters—all these things have their place in the marvelous, impossibly dramatic lottery of life. Neither genetic inheritance nor environment can explain everything. We should be grateful that this is so.
    *   *   *
     
What happens when you gather 200 of the world’s most serious scholars, isolate them in a wooded compound, liberate them from all the mundane distractions of university life, and tell them to do their best work? Not much. True, a lot of cutting edge research gets done at the celebrated Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton. Due to the Institute’s remarkable hospitality, there is no better place for an academic to sit and think. Yet the problem, according to many fellows, is that the only thing there is to do at the Institute is sit and think. It would be an understatement to call the IAS an Ivory Tower, for there is no more lofty place. Most world-class academic institutions, even the very serious, have a place where a weary bookworm can get a pint and listen to the jukebox. Not so the IAS. Old hands talk about the salad days of the 40s and 50s when the Institute was party central for Princeton’s intellectual elite. John von Neumann invented modern computing, but he is also rumored to have cooked up a collection of mind-numbing cocktails that he liberally distributed at wild fetes. Einstein turned physics on its head, but he also took the occasional turn at the fiddle. Taking their clues from the Ancients, the patriarchs of the Institute apparently believed that men (as they would have said) should be well-rounded, engaging in activities high and low, according to the Golden Mean. But now the Apollonian has so overwhelmed the Dionysian at the Institute that, according to many members, even the idea of having a good time is considered only in abstract terms. Walking around the Institute’s grounds, you might trip over a Nobel laureate or a Fields medalist. Given the generous support of the Institute, you might even become one. But you can be pretty certain that you won’t have adrink or a laugh with either.
[From the liner notes to Final Report (1999), a self-produced album by Do Not Erase, the only rock band ever formed at the Institute for Advanced Study]

 
     
    TWELVE
     
    Princeton
    January 17, 2009
    Saturday evening, dinner together at home.
    The whole day was taken up with a trip organized by the Institute for visiting members. A trip to the holiest of shrines for anyone who’s enthralled by the story of life: the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
    I recall very well my first visit to this museum, almost exactly ten years ago. The excitement of seeing some of the most famous fossils in the world, fossils whose pictures are found in the guides and dictionaries of dinosaurs that I devoured as a teenager, was indescribable.
    Today I went back ten years into the past and left my mathematical cares behind for a few hours. Over dinner, however, they caught up with me.
    Claire was rather taken aback, seeing my face contorted by tics and twitches.
    The proof of Landau damping still hasn’t come together. My mind was churning.
    What do you have to do, for God’s sake, what do you have to do to get a decay through transfer of regularity with respect to position when the velocities have been composed … this composition is what introduces a dependence with respect to velocity—but I don’t want any velocities!
    What a mess.
    I scarcely bothered to make conversation, responding in as few words as possible, otherwise by grunts.
    “Was it ever cold today! We could have gone sledding.… Did you happen to