He phrased this so oddly, "his first son," that I'm wondering if it wasn't his first child, but was... just his first *son* to be born. As in, he has at least one daughter already? Would be interested if someone could confirm.
@@verity3616 According to Wikipedia: _Maynard was born on 10 June 1987 in Chelmsford, England.[1] His partner is Eleanor Grant, a medical doctor. They have a child.[4]_ Citation [4] there is "Klarreich, Erica (June 2022). "A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers". Quanta Magazine. Archived from the original on 5 July 2022. Retrieved 5 July 2022." The interview it links to reads *He and his partner, Eleanor Grant, are expecting the birth of their first child within a few days, allowing Maynard just enough time for a quick visit to Helsinki.* Which is clearly the same kid he's talking about here.
"Most mathematicians are really motivated by mathematics" Congratulations James!!!. congratulations to james! he is crazy genius, humble and certainly deserved it.
Andrew Wiles couldn't be awarded the Fields medal for proving Fermat's Last Theorem because he was 41, but he was awarded a special prize (a silver plaque)
@@andrewcgs Andrew wiles was awarded the abel prize, and a slew of other prizes. But I'm sure in his heart the best prize was being able to solve his childhood dream
James Maynard is one of my favorites on Numberphile but I missed this and have only just found he won the Fields. Well done James. Loved the Birth Year Mod 4 comment.
I love the attitude of the relentless problem solver - thanks for the prize but have you considered that 4-yearly sampling with a 40 year cut-off is a suboptimal algorithm for discovering promising mathematicians?
I would love to see an unadulterated version of a mathematicians normal day. Too many movies show the bloke fishing and they just “by Jove” and then they solve the problem. What’s their normal desk day like?
Apparently two people can't share a prize for the same work and he felt it was unfair to claim all the credit when his proof was built on the work of living mathematicians who apparently did a lot of the significant discoveries that allowed him to sort of prove it in one fell swoop.
James has found the best usage for his Fileds Medal. It's made of noble metal, it's anti-bacterial and it's too big to be swallowed, so it makes a perfect toy for infants.
"if you're 41 you can't win . . if you only were born a year earlier" . . then you would be 42 . . so you couldn't win either - classic math mistake of a field medal winner 😂
He said it slightly wrong but I believe the scenario he had in mind was something like this: born in 1989 -> proves major result in 2026 (age 37), but after that year's winners were already decided -> next Fields medal awarded 2030 (age 41) -> too old born one year earlier in 1988 -> proves major result in 2025 (age 37) -> next Fields medal awarded 2026 (age 38) -> yay
It’s virtually a universal truth that any mathematician (or theoretical physicist) of the first order will *always* have all the whiteboard/blackboard space available to them crowded to incomprehensibility. If they have to share this space any empty gaps will have been filled with the comment “DO NOT ERASE”
@deletereddit1102Uh...yeah they do. He has his pick of institution. Universities care much more about research than they do about teaching. Research is their primary mission. They promote and hire based on research, and this is as prestigious a research award as you can get.
This is the kind of guy who wins the Medal, for research on a subject that really great mathematicians have been exploring for 500+ years. Bravo James ...
Well, there is a different prize you'd get, specific for a list of problems that includes the Riemann conjecture. I think the prize is a million dollars.
I love that no one in the comments got your joke. He should have said "one year later." We have a term for this in software. This is a version of the off-by-one error (this leads to being off by 2, but they all get lumped together).
Jokes aside, this again dispels the somewhat common misconception that one's proficiency in mental arithmetics is meaningfully correlated with one's ability to apply, advance, or even invent math.
Imagine winning the most famous award in your field and the next day you go back your first son is born. I'm surprised he didn't pass out from all the emotions.
I don't think I'll ever be able to understand the work that's gone into the achievement, but I do have an idea of the magnitude of the achievement, congratulations!
12:06 I was discussing this with a friend and we agreed that the optimal time for a kid to be born is around September of a 2 (mod 4) year: they'd turn 40 right after the last Fields Medal they're eligible for, and they'd turn 18 right before the first US presidential election they're eligible for
When it comes to the Nobel Prize, some of the awards aren't given at the end of the career. In fact, the Peace Prize seems to be given routinely to people who haven't done a thing at all. Barack Obama comes to mind.
4:55 I was super hyped to see June Huh among the winners! He was an amazing expositor in the "g-conjecture" video, which is one of my favorite Numberphile videos.
His parents should be really proud for this achievement. I just paused this video to watch the body cam vid of britney spears being pulled over for speeding....thats why ill never win the fields medal.
You said "imagine solving the Riemann Hypothesis at age 41" Worse, imagine being recognized as having solved it when you are 37 (presumably having solved it some time before but needing peer review and acknowledgement), with the next award four years away when you are 41.
I think another criticism of the age limit, which James sort of alludes to, is that it may simply take a long time to solve a particular problem. For instance, Perelman locked himself away from the world for like 7 years or something to prove the Poincaré conjecture. So if he started when he was 34, he wouldn't have been eligible. It's not hard to imagine that it might take even more time devoted to a single problem to solve it. Like, what if it actually requires 20 years of work for someone to solve the Riemann hypothesis or P v NP? "Sorry sir/ma'am, you're 42, better luck next life"?
Yea except he didnt actually prove the poincare conjecture and knowingly put forth an incorrect proof in order to demonstrate the absurdity of the award which is why he didn't accept the medal cause it comes with a cash prize and it would be fraudulent of him to accept it.
@@Laocoon283 Quit talking mad bs. Perelman is a man neither for public stunts nor awards. He is (was) a mathematician of the highest caliber, and did indeed prove the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's geometrization conjecture as well as a number of other interesting new theorems related to the Ricci flow.
As to the age limit, the Nobel Prize has a limit, too. It CANNOT be awarded posthumously. That requirement, explicitly made in Nobel's will establishing the prizes, kept two eminently deserving people from winning it: Henry Moseley, who experimentally demonstrated that the major properties of an element are determined by the atomic number (died in battle in WWI just as the importance of his work was becoming known), and Oswald Avery, who proved that it was DNA that carried genetic information (died before the Nobel Prize people got around to seriously considering him).
What would be interesting to learn is how has winning the medal opened any doors or made work/life easier? My point is that when we as a society recognize someone's contributions, I would hope it helps the recipient in some way beyond having a pretty prize that has be locked up.
I hijacked the whole internet and I'm going to hold it hostage until humans stop launching imaginary rockets that go nowhere. The space|time to teleport out of The Matrix is whenever|whenever the math|magic hits you. 🫴✨🪄
Love this guy on here. Numberphile through Brady has introduced us to so many likeable affable clever folk. I've made a list of my favourites which certainly isn't exhaustive. Holly Krieger, Hannah Fry, Zvezdelina Stankova, David Eisenbud, Ron Graham, Edward Frenkel. Who was your favourite and what distinguished them in your eyes?
I just proved the Riemann Hypothesis but of course, being over 40, I've buried it along with my thoroughly convincing proofs of the Collatz and Twin Prime Conjectures.
10:05 - that's weird... What if some 41-y-old mathematician proved Riemann's zeta function zeros or Collatz conjecture - I think these would deserve an award :O 12:28 - 😄😄😄 Brady thought the same as I did :D
Brady makes a joke "if you prove the Reimann Hypothesis at age 41..." But, that is almost exactly what happened to Andrew Wiles except it was Fermat's Last Theorem.
can't believe i didn't hear about this until now, one of the best numberphile contributors
I feel like a math hipster now lol. "yeah, i was familiar with James Maynard BEFORE he won the fields medal"
@@shasan2393
What’s with the misnaming?
@@ragnkja Woops, sorry mistyped his name. Just goes to show how much I was familiar with him lol
He's also now a Fellow of the Royal Society! Can't wait to see what his future work has in store.
@@jsheradinHave you heard about the Reimann solution yet? 2023 年 8 月 16 日.
Imagine having your first kid and being awarded a Fields medal on the same week. What a week!
He phrased this so oddly, "his first son," that I'm wondering if it wasn't his first child, but was... just his first *son* to be born. As in, he has at least one daughter already? Would be interested if someone could confirm.
@@verity3616 someone like google or wikipedia?
@@verity3616
According to Wikipedia: _Maynard was born on 10 June 1987 in Chelmsford, England.[1] His partner is Eleanor Grant, a medical doctor. They have a child.[4]_
Citation [4] there is "Klarreich, Erica (June 2022). "A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers". Quanta Magazine. Archived from the original on 5 July 2022. Retrieved 5 July 2022."
The interview it links to reads *He and his partner, Eleanor Grant, are expecting the birth of their first child within a few days, allowing Maynard just enough time for a quick visit to Helsinki.*
Which is clearly the same kid he's talking about here.
Imagine how underwhelming the following weeks would be...
@@archimidis they would be super stressful because you're caring for a newborn.
"Most mathematicians are really motivated by mathematics" Congratulations James!!!. congratulations to james! he is crazy genius, humble and certainly deserved it.
Something tells me that if you prove the Rieman hypothesis at age 41 then not winning the fields medal isn't going to hold you back too much…
😂
Andrew Wiles couldn't be awarded the Fields medal for proving Fermat's Last Theorem because he was 41, but he was awarded a special prize (a silver plaque)
@@andrewcgs Andrew wiles was awarded the abel prize, and a slew of other prizes. But I'm sure in his heart the best prize was being able to solve his childhood dream
congratulations to james! he is crazy genius, humble and certainly deserved it
James Maynard is one of my favorites on Numberphile but I missed this and have only just found he won the Fields. Well done James. Loved the Birth Year Mod 4 comment.
He seems to exemplify the joy of pursuing math! Congratulations, James Maynard!
I love the attitude of the relentless problem solver - thanks for the prize but have you considered that 4-yearly sampling with a 40 year cut-off is a suboptimal algorithm for discovering promising mathematicians?
Congrats!
Reading the title, i was gonna ask if it was for '46 and 2' or something else.
Refusing the Fields medal by mistake may be a thing. Refusing the Fields medal certainly has been a thing.
3:30 here we learn that his confidence is important to him & that he analyzed its properties in the shadow of Perelman
Congratulazioni 🏅
The picture of his son with the medal is brilliant
I still find life's reverse uno move on Perelman amusing
Reading the winners' contributions made be feel dumber by the syllable..
Congrats!
Congratulations James! The picture of his son with the medal was so cute I had to screenshot it and send it to my wife 😆
omg congratulations!!!
Great contributor! Congrats to him!
So inspiring
Congratulazioni!
Good job mate🥇
We’ve been saying for years that he’ll win one. AND HERE IT IS!!!
Winning this for the weird time signatures on Lateralus - amazing 🎉🎉🎉
Congratulations James Maynard! Very impressive.
Congrats
Congratulations dr Maynard! Well deserved reward!
I wish there was more footage on the medal itself!
"How was your week?"
"Yeah, quite good: won a Fields medal and became a dad."
I would love to see an unadulterated version of a mathematicians normal day. Too many movies show the bloke fishing and they just “by Jove” and then they solve the problem. What’s their normal desk day like?
i am a big fan of sit james maynard
I'll know I'm in the right time and country when men like Maynard are our Rockstars and heroes.
12:29 He means if you're born one year later. Fields medal come on
9:03 Didn’t Richard Feynman says something similar to this? Something like “The knowledge is the reward.”
I should get one too for my contribution in the field of Methematics
8:59 Now it's downhill from here ;)
Seems like he hit the gym too
Now I'm curious why the one person declined the medal.
There are books written about him!
Felt other people who worked on the problem we’re overlooked iirc
Apparently two people can't share a prize for the same work and he felt it was unfair to claim all the credit when his proof was built on the work of living mathematicians who apparently did a lot of the significant discoveries that allowed him to sort of prove it in one fell swoop.
Have a replica made so you can have it on display all the time. You will know that you have the real one locked away safely. Congrats.
By definition it can't be the "nobel" prize of mathematics when it has an age limit to it.
The brain is s…….ooooo….amazing.
What is that instrument at 06:21 called? It sounds awesome IMO.
I came to the comments hoping someone had answered already!
Apparently it’s a tagelharpa!
Wow - contratulatinos!
In 3 months I will field medal..
Better find a new home for the medal after saying it was at home.
I think the format of the Fields Medal is far better than the Nobel where it's octogenarians doddering out for their ceremonies....
Why are you just now releasing this? I thought he won in 2022.
my dumbass brain thought that was a chocolate coin
I can see Benedict Cumberbatch play him
The first Fields Medal was awarded in 1936, 87 years ago and now goes to James Maynard at 36, born in 1987.
whoa thats cool
It's kismet!
From this we learn the important theorem that
1936+87
= 1987+36
@@Dayanto i found my nomination for next season.
SYMMETRY
James has found the best usage for his Fileds Medal. It's made of noble metal, it's anti-bacterial and it's too big to be swallowed, so it makes a perfect toy for infants.
Wouldn't want my baby to bite on it tho
Also, a baby holding a Fields Medal is one of the most adorable images ever created.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721the winners keep getting younger, I tell ya.
@@highviewbarbell Well, they can't be over 40, so they may as well be under 1! 😁
LOL
"if you're 41 you can't win . . if you only were born a year earlier" . . then you would be 42 . . so you couldn't win either - classic math mistake of a field medal winner 😂
He said it slightly wrong but I believe the scenario he had in mind was something like this:
born in 1989 -> proves major result in 2026 (age 37), but after that year's winners were already decided -> next Fields medal awarded 2030 (age 41) -> too old
born one year earlier in 1988 -> proves major result in 2025 (age 37) -> next Fields medal awarded 2026 (age 38) -> yay
Hopefully he can parlay this into a bigger office - dude clearly deserves another whiteboard!
@deletereddit1102 Until they get wind of being recruited to a competing university. Then things tend to change rapidly.
A tiny little whiteboard for his son to work next to him 😁
It’s virtually a universal truth that any mathematician (or theoretical physicist) of the first order will *always* have all the whiteboard/blackboard space available to them crowded to incomprehensibility. If they have to share this space any empty gaps will have been filled with the comment “DO NOT ERASE”
@deletereddit1102Uh...yeah they do. He has his pick of institution. Universities care much more about research than they do about teaching. Research is their primary mission. They promote and hire based on research, and this is as prestigious a research award as you can get.
At Oxford University this is considered a palatial office.
This is the kind of guy who wins the Medal, for research on a subject that really great mathematicians have been exploring for 500+ years. Bravo James ...
Who says we can't do the same thing he did?
@@leif1075your math grades.
@@kkgt6591 😂😂🤣🤣
@@kkgt6591 My math grades were great..Why would you assume they weren't or anything else without knowing anything about me?
@@leif1075Don’t take it seriously dude, its just trolling. Grades have nothing to do with being groundbreaking in a field anyway.
Imagine being born and one of the first thing handed to you is a Fields Medal
For his playful yet elegant proof of the drooling conjecture and his stunning expansions in the field of diaperometry
"You're out of luck if you solve Riemann when you're 41. But if you were born just one year earlier..." ~Prize-winning mathematician! 😂
Age discrimination is everywhere...
However I truly congratulate this guy anyway!
Well, there is a different prize you'd get, specific for a list of problems that includes the Riemann conjecture. I think the prize is a million dollars.
I love that no one in the comments got your joke. He should have said "one year later."
We have a term for this in software. This is a version of the off-by-one error (this leads to being off by 2, but they all get lumped together).
Jokes aside, this again dispels the somewhat common misconception that one's proficiency in mental arithmetics is meaningfully correlated with one's ability to apply, advance, or even invent math.
Imagine winning the most famous award in your field and the next day you go back your first son is born. I'm surprised he didn't pass out from all the emotions.
Well that's why he's so chill in interviews. He ran out of high evergy emotion juice during that week and now his maximum excited state is a bit lower
implies second son was born?
@@cmu6443 That's not at all how English works.
I love how at 4:52 James Maynard is the only one smiling. Everyone else is like "Let's get this over with so I can go back to researching"
I don't think you can blame Ukranian mathematician Maryna Viazovska at that particular time.
Viazovska was going through difficult times and had young colleagues and students who died during the Russia-Ukraine war.
I don't think I'll ever be able to understand the work that's gone into the achievement, but I do have an idea of the magnitude of the achievement, congratulations!
I can safely say working like crazy for 20+ years and being lucky enough to be born in a place and time to have great tutors/parents .
13:42 photographic evidence of world record fields medal speedrun. run time: less than 1 day
12:06 I was discussing this with a friend and we agreed that the optimal time for a kid to be born is around September of a 2 (mod 4) year: they'd turn 40 right after the last Fields Medal they're eligible for, and they'd turn 18 right before the first US presidential election they're eligible for
... I was born in September 1990. I guess I have a lot of work to do over the next 6-years-and-1-month 😂
@@IceMetalPunk The spirit of an atomic ninja already exists inside you. ⚛️🥷
Provided you're a politically motivated mathematician
Funny how i was born September 2002
I am a math major and my last name means "presedent" in my language
Mans got skills.
Congratulations to Maynard James Keenan for winning the Fields Medal for his work with the Fibonacci sequence!
Danny Carey was robbed!
What’s with the misnaming?
@@ragnkja math guy sound like tool guy
@@blower5
And?
And for his work with parabolas on Lateralus
When it comes to the Nobel Prize, some of the awards aren't given at the end of the career. In fact, the Peace Prize seems to be given routinely to people who haven't done a thing at all. Barack Obama comes to mind.
4:55 I was super hyped to see June Huh among the winners! He was an amazing expositor in the "g-conjecture" video, which is one of my favorite Numberphile videos.
I could listen to this guy talk for at least an eon or two... Congrats on this achievement, sir! 👑
5:11 Maryna - “I can’t believe I have to sit here and accept this stupid award when I could be doing maths….”
"Most mathematicians are really motivated by mathematics" ❤ Congratulations James!!!
He should have a replica made to use as a show piece.
why
His parents should be really proud for this achievement. I just paused this video to watch the body cam vid of britney spears being pulled over for speeding....thats why ill never win the fields medal.
Dang new speed run champion for Fields Medal. Nice job
You said "imagine solving the Riemann Hypothesis at age 41"
Worse, imagine being recognized as having solved it when you are 37 (presumably having solved it some time before but needing peer review and acknowledgement), with the next award four years away when you are 41.
Maryna V looks like the least enthusiastic prize winner ever 😂
Congratulations!
I think another criticism of the age limit, which James sort of alludes to, is that it may simply take a long time to solve a particular problem. For instance, Perelman locked himself away from the world for like 7 years or something to prove the Poincaré conjecture. So if he started when he was 34, he wouldn't have been eligible. It's not hard to imagine that it might take even more time devoted to a single problem to solve it. Like, what if it actually requires 20 years of work for someone to solve the Riemann hypothesis or P v NP? "Sorry sir/ma'am, you're 42, better luck next life"?
Yea except he didnt actually prove the poincare conjecture and knowingly put forth an incorrect proof in order to demonstrate the absurdity of the award which is why he didn't accept the medal cause it comes with a cash prize and it would be fraudulent of him to accept it.
@@Laocoon283 Quit talking mad bs. Perelman is a man neither for public stunts nor awards. He is (was) a mathematician of the highest caliber, and did indeed prove the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's geometrization conjecture as well as a number of other interesting new theorems related to the Ricci flow.
@@jameson44k You should read more into it. The committee established to verify the proof cannot.
@@Laocoon283 That isn't true and it isn't why he didn't accept it. You're straight making things up.
@@Laocoon283 I rarely comment on silly comments, but please stop speaking rubbish. Just because you type things with conviction doesn't make them true
What an achievement! Congratulations!!
What a guy... 3 time Formula 1 champion and now a fields medal!
I love the fact that one of the world's finest working mathematicians has apparently quite recently run into the edge of an open door.
As to the age limit, the Nobel Prize has a limit, too. It CANNOT be awarded posthumously. That requirement, explicitly made in Nobel's will establishing the prizes, kept two eminently deserving people from winning it: Henry Moseley, who experimentally demonstrated that the major properties of an element are determined by the atomic number (died in battle in WWI just as the importance of his work was becoming known), and Oswald Avery, who proved that it was DNA that carried genetic information (died before the Nobel Prize people got around to seriously considering him).
What would be interesting to learn is how has winning the medal opened any doors or made work/life easier? My point is that when we as a society recognize someone's contributions, I would hope it helps the recipient in some way beyond having a pretty prize that has be locked up.
I hijacked the whole internet and I'm going to hold it hostage until humans stop launching imaginary rockets that go nowhere. The space|time to teleport out of The Matrix is whenever|whenever the math|magic hits you. 🫴✨🪄
Love this guy on here. Numberphile through Brady has introduced us to so many likeable affable clever folk. I've made a list of my favourites which certainly isn't exhaustive. Holly Krieger, Hannah Fry, Zvezdelina Stankova, David Eisenbud, Ron Graham, Edward Frenkel. Who was your favourite and what distinguished them in your eyes?
I used to be fascinated by Nobel prizes and Fields medal. Not anymore.
My mother wanted me to win the Fields Medal but I am not a mathematician. What a disappointment!
So happy for you James, and for the journey to be brilliantly documented by Numberphile! Such a dream come true! :)
I think Perelman's name will echo in mathematical eternity rather than an uncountable eternity had he accepted.
Congratulations on your new addition to the family! The Fields Medal is cool too I guess.
who knew the Fields medal award had a "what year you were born, mod 4" specification? interesting.
And for his work on Diaphantine approximations, at that!
Congratulations, James! Hard-earned but well-earned.
I've never wanted to be a mathematician more than I want to be one right now
It's never too late to jump into this beautiful abyss.
@@user_2793 "beautiful abyss" is a great way of putting it.
He painted a wall and then won a fields medal and then wiped a baby's butt. Renaissance man.
they need to make a 2022 fields medalist whatsapp group though
How do you top that Week? Probably solve some small riddles like Riemann Hypothesis or Collatz Conjuncture otherwise that's the Peak. Period.
I just proved the Riemann Hypothesis but of course, being over 40, I've buried it along with my thoroughly convincing proofs of the Collatz and Twin Prime Conjectures.
Coordinates of buried capsule posted in the billionth and first root zero of the Zeta function.
Most sincere CONGRATULATIONS!! 🥳
10:05 - that's weird... What if some 41-y-old mathematician proved Riemann's zeta function zeros or Collatz conjecture - I think these would deserve an award :O
12:28 - 😄😄😄 Brady thought the same as I did :D
I think they should adapt the age. It seems not very appropriate anymore that the age limit is so low.
Brady makes a joke "if you prove the Reimann Hypothesis at age 41..." But, that is almost exactly what happened to Andrew Wiles except it was Fermat's Last Theorem.
I love this style of video. Interviewing mathematicians is really tickling my anthropology bone
They should totally provide you with two medals... the truly valuable one and a plated one for display.
thought the james dude was the tool guy