James Maynard (mathematician)
| James Maynard | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born |
June 10, 1987 Chelmsford, England[1] |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Montreal, Oxford University |
| Alma mater | Cambridge University, Oxford University |
| Doctoral advisor | Roger Heath-Brown[2] |
| Known for | Work on prime gaps |
| Notable awards |
SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2014) Whitehead Prize (2015) |
James Maynard (born 10 June 1987) is a British mathematician best known for his work on prime gaps.[1]
In November 2013, Maynard gave a different proof of Yitang Zhang's theorem[3] that there are bounded gaps between primes, and resolved a longstanding conjecture by showing that for any 
there are infinitely many intervals of bounded length containing prime numbers.[4] This work can be seen as progress on the Hardy–Littlewood -tuples conjecture as it establishes that "a positive proportion of admissible -tuples satisfy the prime -tuples conjecture
for every ."[5] Maynard's approach yielded the upper bound
which improved significantly upon the best existing bounds due to the Polymath 8 project.[6] (In other words, he showed that there are infinitely many prime gaps at most 600.) Subsequently, Polymath 8b was created,[7] whose collaborative efforts have reduced the gap size to 252.[6]
As of April 14, 2014, one year after Zhang's announcement, according to the Polymath project wiki, N has been reduced to 246.[6] Further, assuming the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture and its generalized form, the Polymath project wiki states that N has been reduced to 12 and 6, respectively.[6]
In August 2014, Maynard[8] (and independently of Ford, Green, Konyagin and Tao) resolved a longstanding conjecture of Erdos on large gaps between primes, and received the largest Erdos prize (10000$) ever offered.[9]
After completing his bachelor's and master's degrees at Cambridge University in 2009, Maynard obtained his Ph.D. from Oxford University at Balliol College in 2013 under the supervision of Roger Heath-Brown.[1] For the 2013–2014 year, Maynard was a CRM-ISM postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal.[10]
In 2014, he was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize.[11]
References
- 1 2 3 James Maynard to Receive 2014 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, Krishnaswami Alladi
- ↑ James Maynard at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Zhang, Yitang. "Bounded gaps between primes". Annals of Mathematics (Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study). doi:10.4007/annals.2014.179.3.7. Retrieved August 16, 2013.
- ↑ Klarreich, Erica (19 November 2013). "Together and Alone, Closing the Prime Gap". Quanta Magazine (Simons Institute).
- ↑ "Small Gaps Between Primes". arXiv.org.
- 1 2 3 4 "Bounded gaps between primes". Polymath. Retrieved 2013-07-21.
- ↑ "Polymath8b: Bounded intervals with many primes, after Maynard".
- ↑ "Large gaps between primes". arXiv. Retrieved 2014-08-21.
- ↑ "Mathematicians Make a Major Discovery About Prime Numbers". Wired. Retrieved 2015-07-27.
- ↑ "Oxford Webpage".
- ↑ Alladi, Krishnaswami (December 2014), "Maynard Awarded 2014 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize" (PDF), Mathematics People, Notices of the AMS 61 (11): 1361, ISSN 1088-9477.
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