James Maynard: Prime Detecting Sieves (September 10, 2025)

Many of the most famous open questions on primes are examples of a simple universal statistics phenomenon where we expect the number of primes in a set to be (well-approximated by) a product of local densities of the set. A key reason that proving these guesses appears hard is that there are possible ‘global’ obstructions even for fairly well-understood sets. I’ll talk about joint work with Kevin Ford (in progress) which aims to obtain a better understanding of the nature of these global obstructions. Uploaded 25-09-25 For more information go here: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/event/mps-conference-on-universal-statistics-in-number-theory/