Mavericks of Science

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.