Oxford Mathematician James Maynard has been awarded a European Mathematical Society Prize at the 7th European Congress of Mathematics in Berlin. The prizes are awarded every four years in recognition of excellence in mathematics to ten individuals under the age of 35 living or working in Europe.
In the words of the judges James was awarded the prize for "his remarkable and deep results in analytic number theory, dealing especially with the distribution of primes. He is recognised in particular for his new proof, with improved estimates, of the 'small gaps between the primes theorem'."
In addition to James, Geordie Williamson, formerly a researcher in Oxford Mathematics was also awarded a prize for his "fundamental contributions to the representation theory of Lie algebra and algebraic groups, including his proof of Seorgel's conjecture on bimodules associated to Coxeter groups, and his startling counterexamples to the expected bounds in Lustig's conjecture on the characters of rational representations of algebraic groups."