Mavericks of Science

In the quiet woods of Princeton, New Jersey, there is a sanctuary where the ordinary rules of the world seem suspended. Here, at the Institute for Advanced Study, a tall man with hazy eyes walks the same stone paths once trodden by Albert Einstein. His name is Edward Witten, and among the assembly of geniuses, he stands apart—a thinker often called a "high priest" of theoretical physics and the "Darth Vader of Physics" for his formidable intellectual power.Witten is the only physicist ever to be awarded the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor. His influence is so vast that his intuition alone has steered the direction of entire fields for decades, with his scholarly impact ranking him among the most referenced scientists in history.

On an October morning in 2025, the telephone rang in the Santa Barbara home of John Clarke. On the line was the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with news that would stun the physics world: Clarke, along with his former students Michel Devoret and John Martinis, had won the Nobel Prize in Physics. While the world now races to build massive quantum computers, this prize honored a "quiet" breakthrough from 1985—a moment when Clarke’s team proved that a human-made circuit could follow the same spooky rules as a single atom.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we look at the mentor and steady hand behind the quantum revolution—the man who taught a generation of physicists how to listen to the silent signals of the subatomic world.

This is the story of a man whose career seems to cleave in two. On one side is the Nobel-winning prodigy who revealed the "Josephson effect," a cornerstone of quantum reality. On the other hand is the Cambridge emeritus professor who defends telepathy, cold fusion, and "water memory".In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we explore whether Brian Josephson is a cautionary tale of a brilliant mind lost to the fringe or a pioneer trying to map the unseen borders of consciousness.

In the world of higher mathematics, progress usually moves in inches, built upon decades of shared certainty. But on February 10, 2025, a 17-year-old student named Hannah Cairo published a paper that acted like a wrecking ball to a 40-year-old mountain of logic. By disproving the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, she didn't just solve a homework problem; she caused the collapse of a major pathway intended to unify the entire field of harmonic analysis.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we continue the journey of the young "heretic" from the Bahamas who realized that the "linchpin" of modern Fourier theory was based on a flawed assumption.

In 1904, Henri Poincaré posed a riddle about the very fabric of our universe that would taunt mathematicians for a century. For decades, brilliant thinkers failed to solve it, and by 2000, a $1 million prize was placed on its head. Then, in 2002, a reclusive Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted a few papers online that finally cracked the code.Welcome to Mavericks of Science. In today's episode, we uncover the incredible story of Grigori Perelman. He became the first person in history to decline the Fields Medal and later walked away from the $1 million Millennium Prize, famously stating, "I have all I want."

Primes are the ultimate enigma of the universe, simple to define but stubbornly chaotic in their behavior. To most, they seem scattered randomly across the number line, but James Maynard has spent his career proving that within that chaos lies a hidden, beautiful order.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we trace the journey of the "rebellious child" from Chelmsford, who refused to show his work in physics class and grew up to become one of the world's leading number theorists. From shrinking the gaps between primes to solving "absurdly simple" riddles about the digit 7, Maynard’s work is redefining the building blocks of mathematics

In late 2020, as a deadly virus swept the globe, the world pinned its hopes on a new class of vaccines that arrived in record time. While the headlines were filled with corporate names and political figures, the true miracle was built on the back of three decades of dogged persistence by a quiet chemist named Katalin Karikó.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we trace the journey of a scientist whose work on messenger RNA (mRNA) was dismissed for years as "fringe science". From being demoted and losing her lab space to selling her personal belongings to keep her research alive, Karikó’s story is the ultimate testament to the power of conviction

Most mathematicians are identified as prodigies by the time they can walk, but June Huh was different. A high school dropout who dreamed of becoming a poet, Huh didn't discover his calling until his sixth year of college—and even then, it was by wandering into the "wrong" classroom.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we explore the unconventional journey of the man who treated mathematics like a canvas for discovery. By applying the elegance of geometry to the rigid world of counting, Huh solved a 50-year-old mystery and became the first person with his "wanderer" background to win the Fields Medal.

In 1985, a team of physicists in a Berkeley basement watched a tiny superconducting chip do the impossible: it performed a "quantum leap" that should have been restricted to the world of individual atoms. Fast forward forty years, and that niche experiment became the origin story for a multi-billion-dollar global race to build the first true quantum computer.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we dive into the life of Michel Devoret, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner who bridged the gap between engineering and the deepest mysteries of the quantum world. From his childhood "awakening" in an American university town to his work as the Chief Scientist at Google Quantum AI, Devoret has spent his career building "artificial atoms" that are changing the future of technology.

Imagine a material so porous that a single gram—the weight of a paperclip—could cover several football fields if unfolded. Now imagine using that material to pull clean drinking water out of thin air in the middle of a desert. This isn't science fiction; it’s the life's work of Omar Yaghi, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we trace Yaghi’s improbable journey from a Palestinian refugee home in Jordan with no running water to the cutting edge of "atomic LEGOs". It’s a story of how a boy who once spent his dawns hauling water containers grew up to invent the "crystalline sponges" that might solve the world's water crisis.

From the bustling, book-lined streets of Tehran to the sun-drenched halls of Stanford, Maryam Mirzakhani didn't just solve equations, she painted them. In an office filled with sprawling sheets of paper, her daughter called "Mommy’s paintings," Mirzakhani mapped out surfaces that curve and twist in ways the human eye can barely conceive.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we celebrate the life of the first woman and first Iranian to ever win the Fields Medal. Her story is one of "quiet restlessness," taking us from a childhood love of literature to the pinnacle of mathematical discovery, all before her life was tragically cut short at age 40.

At just nine years old, Netta Engelhardt moved to a new country and picked up a book that would define her life: Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. While most found it a challenging read, she saw it as a map to a mystery that had stumped the world’s greatest physicists for 45 years.In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we explore the journey of Netta Engelhardt, the MIT physicist who—at age 25—developed the formula that finally began to resolve Hawking’s most famous paradox. It is a story of black holes, "quantum smoke and ash," and a V-shaped graph that changed our understanding of reality.

In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we explore the story of Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner, who resurrected a "dead" field of science to discover the immune system’s secret police.Imagine your immune system as a powerful, elite army trained to destroy invaders. But what happens when that army loses its way and begins attacking the very body it’s sworn to protect? For decades, science couldn't explain how this "friendly fire", the root of autoimmune diseases, like Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis, was kept in check. It’s a tale of a decade-long hunt for a microscopic needle in a haystack and a cross-continental puzzle that changed medicine forever.

In this episode of Mavericks Science of, we dive into the extraordinary story of Maryna Viazovska, the Ukrainian mathematician who cracked the code of "perfect packing" in higher dimensions. Have you ever looked at a stack of oranges at the grocery store and wondered if there was a better way to pack them? While a greengrocer might give you a funny look, this deceptively simple question has stumped the world’s greatest mathematical minds for over four centuries. From her early days in Kyiv to her historic rise as only the second woman to ever win the prestigious Fields Medal, Viazovska’s journey is one of resilience, elegance, and sheer brilliance.Join us as we explore how uncovering hidden structures in dimensions beyond our imagination is shaping the future of technology and our understanding of space-time itself.

Meet Hugo Duminil-Copin, the 2022 Fields Medalist whose groundbreaking work uncovered the precise rules that govern phase transitions in complex systems.What connects a melting ice cube, a spreading wildfire, a magnetic switch, and the sudden crash of a financial market? At first glance, they appear random, unpredictable bursts of change. But beneath the chaos lies a world of structure and hidden laws. In this video, we follow Hugo’s journey from a sports-loving teenager in suburban France to a world-renowned figure in mathematics. Initially interested in handball more than homework, Hugo didn’t shine as a prodigy early on. He failed to qualify for the International Mathematical Olympiad. But through persistence, passion, and curiosity, he found his path into the deep, abstract world of probability and statistical physics.Duminil-Copin’s work tackles some of the most fundamental puzzles in physics and mathematics: how systems transition from one state to another. His research on percolation theory, the Ising model, and the Potts model reveals how small, local interactions give rise to dramatic global behavior. Think of how a virus spreads in a population, how a magnet becomes polarized, or how water freezes—his mathematics shows us exactly when and why these transformations occur. One of his major achievements was proving how magnetic materials transition in three and four dimensions—problems that had resisted mathematical proof for over half a century. His work not only answered theoretical questions but opened the door to new applications in epidemiology, machine learning, quantum computing, and financial risk modeling. Anywhere uncertainty rules, Duminil-Copin’s ideas are beginning to play a role.