Professor James Maynard awarded a New Horizons Prize

Professor James Maynard, Supernumerary Fellow and Professor of Number Theory, has won the award in recognition of his multiple contributions to analytic number theory, and in particular to the distribution of prime numbers.

James, who recently won the prestigious Fields Medal for his work, is recognised as one of the leading figures in the field of number theory. Much of his career has focused on the study of general questions on the distribution of prime numbers and his achievements include settling a long-standing conjecture of Paul Erdős on large gaps between primes and showing the existence of infinitely many primes missing any given digit (for example, 7).

More recently, in joint work with D. Koukoulopoulos, he settled the Duffin–Schaeffer conjecture and dramatically improved upon the work of Schmidt concerning simultaneous approximation by rationals with square denominator. Most recently, he published a monumental series of works on the distribution of primes in residue classes which goes beyond what follows from the Generalised Riemann Hypothesis.

The New Horizons Prize is part of the Breakthrough Prizes, the world’s largest science awards founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. The prizes recognise the top scientists in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics.