Can we also talk about how this guy is in the third year of his PhD and has no less than 18 papers listed under "major/recent publications", all but two of which are published, and one of the latter 'shocked' the math community?
One of my favorite stories about Maynard is in another one of Quanta's articles, concerning prime number gaps [1]. Yitang Zhang had just established an upper bound of 70 million for prime number gaps. After that, Terence Tao assembled a crowd of mathematicians to try and refine Zhang's method, and over the summer, they incrementally lowered the bound all the way down to 4680. Then Maynard, who had been working solo on developing an entirely different method, came out of the blue and lowered the bound to 600.
I still find the crowd-sourced "Polymath" approach incredibly cool, and Terence Tao himself discusses the benefits of open collaboration and the dangers of working solo [1]. Though clearly, James Maynard does just fine on his own.
[1]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-team-up-on-twi...
And there is a need for many "normal" people to contribute to research in the field too, because a solid part of the equation is sheer man hours. I get being jaded, and I also don't know what field you were in, but regardless I think it's a bit too pessimistic to assume that only prodigies can meaningfully contribute to research.
In other more practical fields, less,-inspired research is useful, and also research is slower due to real world complexity and expense, not inherent intellectual difficulty. Like plowing through all possible chemical rejection looking for one that works, or fine tuning a radio in engineering, or a NN or a big program in CS, or running psych / sociology surveys.
So Lichtman might be on a similar trajectory as Tao, but not accelerated through formal schooling.
And since Lichtman's work is in elementary number theory (similar to combinatorics, one of Tao's main subjects), it's more accessible to early results from a brilliant person with less experience. Other subjects require more background study before reaching new territory.
People on this thread say that in recent years there has been a lot of pressure for math researchers to publish far more often partial / lower quality work to match the publication rate of other fields.
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/48399/how-many-...