Professor James Maynard

Professor Maynard is Professor of Number Theory at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. He took his BA and 'Part III' in Mathematics from Queens' College, Cambridge, followed by a DPhil in Oxford under the supervision of Roger Heath-Brown, completed in 2013. He was then a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford from 2013-17. He held a Clay Fellowship at Oxford before his promotion to professor in 2018. He has also held research and visiting positions at Montreal, Berkeley and at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Since 2018 he has been a Professor of Number Theory at the University of Oxford, and a member of St John's College.

James is known for his influential work in analytic number theory, particularly on the distribution of prime numbers. He uses a blend of ideas from analysis, combinatorics and algebra to try to answer old questions in number theory. As a postdoctoral researcher he developed a new sieve method for detecting primes in bounded length intervals, and settled a long-standing conjecture of Paul Erdos on large gaps between primes. He then worked on Diophantine approximation, and 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. He has published a series of works on the distribution of primes in residue classes which goes beyond what follows from the Generalised Riemann Hypothesis.

James has received numerous prizes for his work, including the Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 2015, the European Mathematical Society Prize in 2016, the Cole Prize in Number Theory from the American Mathematical Society in 2020, and the prestigious Fields Medal from the International Mathematical Union in 2022 for his "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 was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2020, as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023 and as a founding Fellow of the Academy of Mathematical Sciences in 2026. James is an avid Arsenal supporter.