James Maynard is one of the young guns of modern mathematics. Specialising in prime numbers,

he made his name for pioneering work on one of math's most famous problems, the twin prime

conjecture. He's since made breakthroughs on a number of other problems, and he's accumulating an

impressive collection of prizes along the way. In fact, since we recorded this episode,

the American Mathematical Society announced he's won another. They're giving him the

2020 Coal Prize in number theory.

Not bad for a 32-year-old, who, by the way, has already been a full research professor for two years.

I met James in his office at Oxford University.

That's start at the beginning.

Little boy, James.

Were you going to be a mathematician?

Were you always mathematical?

Were you a prodigy?

Okay, I definitely don't think I would have counted as a prodigy.

It's very interesting looking back because at the time I never, I was always quite good at maths. Maths was probably my favourite subject at school most of the time in school. So it's easy

to look back and say, oh, clearly I was going to be a mathematician the whole time. Somehow I was

written in stone. But it certainly never felt like that when I was a kid. It was definitely

never clear to me at a young age that I wanted to be a mathematician or anything like that. Or even that being a mathematician was a job that, yeah, sort of when I was choosing school subjects and things at each stage, okay, yeah, maths is one of my favorite subjects, so I guess I'll continue doing maths. But it wasn't that, yes, I definitely want to be a a mathematician or I'm clearly going to be a mathematician or

you know maths is the one and only thing for me was it a favorite subject of yours just because you were

good at it and found it easy or because you got pleasure from it you liked it it's very difficult to

say when you're a kid sort of you definitely like things that you're good at I think yeah I think

it was a bit of both.

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