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Number Theorist James Maynard Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

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In 2013, one of the best — but also one of the worst — things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the discipline’s oldest and most central problems, about the spacing of prime numbers. It was an achievement that ordinarily would have garnered him fame even beyond the cloistered world of pure math research. There was just one difficulty: Another mathematician had proved the most headline-grabbing part of Maynard’s result a few months earlier, using a completely different method. Number theorists, however, instantly recognized Maynard as someone to watch. Few brand-new Ph.D.s would have been stouthearted enough to even tackle such a problem, let alone solve it. In the years that followed, Maynard more than justified those early hopes, knocking down one fundamental problem after another. Today, the 35-year-old mathematician, now a professor at the University of Oxford, was awarded the Fields Medal for his “spectacula

Number Theorist James Maynard Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine Home A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers Read Later Share Copied! Comments Read Later Read Later Previous: 2022 Fields and Abacus Medals For His Sporting Approach to Math, a Fields Medal Next: 2022 Fields and Abacus Medals The Scientist Who Developed a New Way to Understand Communication SERIES 2022 Fields and Abacus Medals A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers By Erica Klarreich July 5, 2022 On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding q

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