Pierre-Louis Lions was born on August 11 1956 in Grasse, France.
A student at the École normale supérieure from 1975 to 1979, he defended his thesis in 1978 and his state thesis in 1979. A researcher at the CNRS from 1979 to 1981, he became a professor at Paris-Dauphine University in 1981 until his appointment to the Collège de France in 2001. He also taught at the École Polytechnique from 1983 to 2016.
Pierre-Louis Lions' work focuses on Partial Differential Equations and Applications. In particular, he introduced the theory of viscosity solutions in collaboration with M. G. Crandall, the concentration-compacity method, and mean-field game theory in collaboration with J.-M. Lasry. He also obtained the first global existence result for solutions of the Boltzmann equation, in collaboration with R. J. Di Perna, as well as the Navier-Stokes equations in the so-called compressible case.
He holds honorary doctorates from seven universities and is a member of eleven academies, including the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Technologies. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994, as well as numerous other prizes and distinctions. He has also held and continues to hold a number of other public and private positions, including Chairman of the Board of Directors of the École normale supérieure from 2009 to 2014. He has also been involved in a number of start-ups, co-founding two of them (MFG Labs and Differential Knowledge).