A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers

"In 2013, one of the best—but also one of the worst—things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the discipline’s oldest and most central problems, about the spacing of prime numbers. It was an achievement that ordinarily would have garnered him fame even beyond the cloistered world of pure math research. There was just one difficulty: Another mathematician had proved the most headline-grabbing part of Maynard’s result a few months earlier, using a completely different method."

Read more at Quanta.