James Maynard

James Maynard was born in Chelmsford, England, and studied at Queens' College, Cambridge, before completing a DPhil at Balliol College, Oxford, in 2013 under Roger Heath-Brown. After postdoctoral positions in Montreal and visits to Berkeley and Princeton, he returned to Oxford as a research professor in 2017.

Shortly after his doctorate, Maynard developed a multidimensional sieve method that gave a far simpler and more flexible proof of bounded gaps between primes than Yitang Zhang's 2013 breakthrough, and moreover extended to show bounded gaps between clusters of $m$ primes for any $m$; a similar independent method was found by the Polymath8 collaborative project. In 2014 he resolved a related conjecture of Paul Erdős on the existence of arbitrarily large gaps between consecutive primes, and in 2016 proved there are infinitely many primes missing any chosen digit from their decimal expansion. With Dimitris Koukoulopoulos he gave, in 2019, a complete proof of the Duffin–Schaeffer conjecture in metric number theory, a decades-old problem about approximating irrational numbers by fractions with prescribed denominators.

Maynard received the Fields Medal in 2022 "for his spectacular contributions to analytic number theory, which have led to major advances in the understanding of the structure of prime numbers and in Diophantine approximation." He continues to work at the University of Oxford, where he is a fellow of St John's College.

Workplaces: University of Oxford

United Kingdom

Contributions, linked to the library