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.[-]

All previous methods of showing the existence of large gaps between primes have relied on the fact that smooth numbers are unusually sparse. This feature of the argument does not seem to generalise to showing large gaps between primes in subsets, such as values of a polynomial. We will talk about recent work which allows us to show large gaps between primes without relying on smooth number estimates. This then generalizes naturally to show long strings of consecutive composite values of a polynomial. This is joint work with Ford, Konyagin, Pomerance and Tao.[-]