> Maynard has done some stellar work to be sure, but he built off of Zhang's breakthrough.
That was actually not my understand from the article (I haven't read the papers either). What I got was that there was an earlier paper ("GPY") that Zhang based his work on. Maynard based his work on a flawed predecessor of GPY. Thus he did not base his work on Zhang's. In fact, the article seems to indicate that further progress could be made by combining their approaches, but it certainly seems from my reading that they're independent. Of course, that could all be wrong, but it is what the article indicates.
That was actually not my understand from the article (I haven't read the papers either). What I got was that there was an earlier paper ("GPY") that Zhang based his work on. Maynard based his work on a flawed predecessor of GPY. Thus he did not base his work on Zhang's. In fact, the article seems to indicate that further progress could be made by combining their approaches, but it certainly seems from my reading that they're independent. Of course, that could all be wrong, but it is what the article indicates.