James Maynard generalizes and simplifies in 2013 (published in 2015 in Annals of Mathematics) the sieve method with which mathematician Yitang Zhang had proved, months earlier in 2013, that there exist infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes separated by a bounded distance — a surprising advance in a field, the distribution of prime numbers, where progress had been extremely slow for decades. Maynard substantially improves the numerical bound Zhang had obtained (from 70 million to a few hundred) and extends the result to configurations of more than two primes, using a technically more flexible approach than the original. Maynard received the Fields Medal in 2022.