Warning from the outset: saying or writing just the words “differential equations” means taking the risk of scaring away readers and listeners. Except that Cédric Villani has a certain talent for being the popularizer and, better still, the storyteller. It is because, he says, differential equations have allowed man “to make predictions about the world around him and to anticipate certain of its developments”, that “weather, transport, space conquest , architecture or even agriculture, our daily lives are inextricably linked to forecasts”, which the mathematician devotes four episodes of a new podcast to giving us a better understanding of.
Episode 1: here we are in France in the 1680s. The Church is on the defensive, while the scientific world is getting organized. Galileo, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal “discarded the old scholasticism of Aristotle”. And then there is this letter, dated October 24, 1676, written in Latin by Isaac Newton to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who would soon be mocked by Voltaire in his Candide. This is what episode 2 reminds us, which opens with an expedition to Lapland (magic of the radio and its teams which transport us there) and makes us discover the life and work of Leonhard Euler, “titan Switzerland” twelve times winner of the Grand Prix of the Academy of Sciences.
Line narration
The third episode is built around “Henri Poincaré’s fruitful error”, and the last episode focuses on the marriage of differential equations and computers. And Villani paid tribute in particular to Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician, whose life was told in Theodore Melfi’s film, Shadow Figures (2016), now available on Disney.
But there’s no need to reveal more, because that’s also what this podcast succeeds in: making us experience each advance like an adventure, keeping us in suspense even though the temptation to run away was great, given the manipulated concepts. By multiplying examples, by crossing disciplines, by paying homage to these men and women (such as Emilie du Châtelet, the first woman whose writings were published by the Academy of Sciences and of whom Voltaire will say, upon his death in 1749: “I lost a friend of twenty-five years: a great man whose only fault was that he was a woman”), in keeping with a narration written on the line and so well put on the air, the team of this first season of “Tales of the Thousand and One Sciences” has succeeded perfectly in its aim: to make them less arduous for us.