Professor James Maynard (Balliol 2009), a pure mathematician who works in number theory, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He is one of 80 new Fellows who have been selected for their substantial contributions to the advancement of science. Announcing the elections, Royal Society President Sir Adrian Smith described them as individuals who ‘have pushed forward the boundaries of their respective fields and had a beneficial influence on the world beyond’.
(photo: Evan Nedyalkov).
James Maynard is Professor of Number Theory at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute and a Fellow of St John’s College. The Royal Society citation reads: ‘James Maynard has many spectacular works in analytic number theory, particularly the theory of prime numbers. He developed a new method in sieve theory and applied it to find bounded gaps between consecutive primes, and then to find the largest known gaps between consecutive primes. He combined sieve theory and Fourier analysis to show that there are infinitely many primes missing any given digit in their decimal expansion. With Koukoulopoulos, he developed novel combinatorial methods to resolve the longstanding Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture in diophantine approximation. In a monumental series of recent works, he has substantially advanced our understanding of the distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions. James Maynard was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.’
‘I’m delighted to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society!’ Professor Maynard said. ‘It is a great honour and amazing to have my name alongside many of the most famous scientists and mathematicians throughout history (as well as several of my esteemed colleagues in Oxford) — people I was inspired by as a child starting to get an interest in mathematics.’