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“I have made a living off the maximum principle,” he quipped, referring to a fundamental technique for establishing inequalities in PDE.

“Yes, I do. I’ve been working on it again for a while now, and I’ve made pretty good progress. I have some ideas. But now I’m stuck. I broke the problem down using several reduced models, but even the simplest one eludes me. I thought I’d gotten a handle on it with a maximum principle argument, but the whole thing collapsed. I need to talk.”

If I were writing about Villani’s journey to the Fields Medal, I would pause and define what mathematicians mean by regularity and the maximum principle.

The original Fielding tariff of 1897 had adopted the minimum and maximum principle, with the intention that a few low-tariff countries should share with Great Britain the advantages of the lower rates.