James Maynard's a high-flying mathematician at Oxford University with a particular interest in prime

numbers. You may even remember seeing him talking enthusiastically about primes in a few of

our YouTube videos. For a little while now,

he's been touted as a possible winner of the Fields Medal, probably the most famous award in mathematics.

Well, now he's won it. They only hand out these medals every four years, and Professor Maynard

was one of the four winners named in the class of 2022.

Admittedly, it's taken a little while, but I finally got in the same room as James and, well, I

asked him all about it. What does it feel like to win such a glittering price? And by the way,

this interview also exists as a video so you can watch it on YouTube if you're so inclined.

So certainly when I was in secondary school, I was aware of the concept of the Fields Medal

as a sort of maths version of the Nobel Prize or something. I think the Fields Medal was the only maths prize I was aware of then. I can't remember at all when the first time I'd heard about the Fields Medal would be. But yeah, it must have been at some point when I was at school. Not Goodwill Hunting. That's when I first heard of it. Goodwill Hunting made the Fields Medal famous. Following you around going to the Fields Medal, the Fields Medal. It's about my medal medal, is it? Oh God, I can go home and get it for you. You can have it. Yeah, so it took me in embarrassing long period of time to watch Goodwill Hunting, I think. So despite the fact I've been keen on maths for such a long time, yeah, somehow everyone else seemed to have watched Goodwill Hunting, but I hadn't watched it, so I didn't learn about it from there.

So you'd heard of it, but I'm assuming you couldn't have listed winners, like, you know, like FA Cup winners and stuff.

It wasn't, you didn't have that kind of knowledge of it.

No, so there would be like a couple of very famous mathematicians who I would be able to name, but then it certainly wasn't the case that in the same way that

I collected football stickers and things like that, I could reel off a name of different fields

medalists. And you didn't dream of winning it? No, I mean, all of these things, yeah, I guess there's

like these legendary mathematicians that I very much looked up to and maybe on some level was

inspired by and wanted to emulate, but it wasn't that

I'd sort of had a personal goal or something to win the Fields Medal.

What mathematicians did you look up to?

Like, when you were young, I didn't ask you that last time we spoke about this part of your

life.

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