Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani (French: [sedʁik patʁis tjeʁi vilani]; born 5 October 1973) is a French politician and mathematician working primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics.

[5][6] Following the dissolution of EDS, Villani joined Ecology Generation, and ran for re-election under the banner of the NUPES.

[7] He was elected vice president of the French Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices in July 2017.

[8] After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Villani was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and studied there from 1992 to 1996, after which he was appointed an agrégé préparateur at the same school.

[9] He received his doctorate at Paris Dauphine University in 1998, under the supervision of Pierre-Louis Lions, and became professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon in 2000.

[12] On 19 October 2014, in the context of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy's inaugural Albertine festival, Villani appeared in conversation with the Nobel Prize winning mathematician John F. Nash, Jr.[13] Several months later, on 23 May 2015, Nash, along with his wife, Alicia died in a car crash.

[15] He has worked on the theory of optimal transport and its applications to differential geometry, and with John Lott has defined a notion of bounded Ricci curvature for general measured length spaces.