Reams of dense equations pasted in from various academic papers aren’t much better, since it’s impossible to follow the logic at work without a fairly high level of mathematical training. It’s interesting to see them at work, even firing off emails on Christmas day, but the text is littered with TeX, a markup language mathematicians use for typesetting equations, which makes it a bit like reading the code of an arcane computer program. Villani’s diary of trips around the world to lecture and research is interspersed with verbatim emails between himself and Mouhot as they attack the problem of Landau damping, a nuance of how waves propagate through a Boltzmann-described gas. “Villani pours you inside his mind, leaving you nothing to hold on to, wondering what you’ll encounter” Instead, Villani pours you inside his mind and swirls you around, leaving you with nothing to hold on to and breathlessly wondering what you’ll encounter next. Initially, it’s a refreshing alternative to most pop-maths books, which understandably make every effort to hold your hand as they guide you through tricky concepts.

In a tumble of dialogue they bat about phrases like “modulo minimal regularity bounds” and “Moser-style iteration scheme” – essentially incomprehensible to the average reader, but they sweep you along for the ride. The pair are wrestling with a tricky case – not a murder, but the intricate properties of the Boltzmann equation, a statistical description of how particles in a gas behave. The book opens like a film noir, as Villani sits sprawling in his office with intellectual partner Clément Mouhot. The book covers the few years leading up to his Fields medal win, giving a flavour of the frantic thought processes behind the work that ultimately won him the prize. Reading his new book, Birth of a Theorem, I instantly recognised that same rhythm. As we chatted, I was charmed by the French mathematician’s rapid-fire way of speaking, a staccato rhythm that jumped from topic to topic without pausing for breath.

Birth of a Theorem by Cédric Villani