We will talk about recent work showing there are infinitely many primes with no $7$ in their decimal expansion. (And similarly with $7$ replaced by any other digit.) This shows the existence of primes in a 'thin' set of numbers (sets which contain at most $X^{1-c}$ elements less than $X$) which is typically vey difficult.
The proof relies on a fun mixture of tools including Fourier analysis, Markov chains, Diophantine approximation, combinatorial geometry as well as tools from analytic number theory.[-]

Alexander Bufetov got his Diploma in Mathematics at the Independent University of Moscow in 1999 and his PhD at Princeton University in 2005. After one year as a Postdoctoral student at the University of Chicago, he was employed as an Assistant Professor at Rice University where he also held the 'Edgar Odell Lovett Junior Chair'. In 2009, Alexander Bufetov joined the Steklov Mathematical Institute where he passed his habilitation thesis in order to supervise PhD students. In 2012, he became a CNRS Senior Researcher for the LATP (Laboratoire d'Analyse, Topologie, Probabilités) department at Aix-Marseille University.
Alexander Bufetov has received several prizes: a Prize by Moscow Mathematical Society in 2005, a grant by the Sloan Foundation and a grant from the President of the Russian Federation in 2010 and also a grant from the Simons Foundation at the Independent University of Moscow in 2011.
His research area is the Ergodic theory of dynamical systems.[-]

Curtis Tracy McMullen (born 21 May 1958) is Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998 for his work in complex dynamics, hyperbolic geometry and Teichmüller theory. McMullen graduated as valedictorian in 1980 from Williams College and obtained his Ph.D. in 1985 from Harvard University, supervised by Dennis Sullivan. He held post-doctoral positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study, after which he was on the faculty at Princeton University (1987–1990) and the University of California, Berkeley (1990–1997), before joining Harvard in 1997. He received the Salem Prize in 1991 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[-]