A conversation in Toulouse, France
Dr. Costilla Reyes traveled to Toulouse for ESOF 2018, the EuroScience Open Forum, after finding the 2016 forum in Manchester the most rewarding interdisciplinary scientific conference he had attended. He was there to present his poster on ambient sensing and dementia research, and on the opening full day he met Cédric Villani, the French mathematician who was then leading France’s national artificial-intelligence strategy. He asked Villani about the spider brooch he wears, and remembers the exchange as a chance to talk with a scientist whose way of thinking he admires.
Villani received the Fields Medal in 2010 for work in kinetic theory, including proofs concerning nonlinear Landau damping in plasmas and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation. What inspires Dr. Costilla Reyes is less any single result than Villani’s willingness to pursue difficult problems across mathematical ideas and find unexpected routes through them.
The forum around the meeting
The encounter was one part of a full week. Dr. Costilla Reyes attended sessions on precision measurement, science communication for under-represented communities, collective intelligence in animal groups, and hands-on workshops on interdisciplinary and fair science and on mental health among doctoral students, and he met researchers from several countries who, as he put it, had crossed paths out of a shared love of science. He left describing ESOF as his favorite interdisciplinary conference in the European Union.