The National Science Foundation (NSF) named Dr John Pardon, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University as the 2017 Alan T. Waterman Award recipient: for his revolutionary, groundbreaking results in geometry and topology, including his resolution of the Herbert-Smith Conjecture in 3-manifolds topology and his program for completing the virtual cycles in the moduli of pseudoholomorphic curves. His leadership and contributions have brought new insights to these central fields of mathematics, and have extended the power of tools of geometric analysis to solve deep problems in real and complex geometry, topology and dynamical systems.
Dr. Pardon is recognized for his new and creative approaches to solve longstanding mathematical problems. His work has introduced highly original solutions to some of the most vexing problems in field, including two characterized as "very famous" and "famously difficult": the Hilbert-Smith conjecture for 3-manifolds and Gromov's knot distortion problem. Pardon's research career began in high school where he showed early promise as a mathematician as he provided a remarkable solution of an "unfolding problem for plane curves." As undergraduate at Princeton, Pardon worked on and solved the Gromov's 30 year old knot distortion problem by establishing a lower bound, which was published in the 2011 Annals of Mathematics. During his graduate career at Stanford, Pardon became an expert in dealing various constructions of moduli for configurations in symplectic and contact topology, and unrelated problems such as the Hilbert-Smith conjecture for 3-manifolds. The Hilbert-Smith conjecture for 3-manifolds is an important problem that has been open for over 70 years, with only partial results. Pardon solved it by using a new and revolutionary approach.
Dr. Pardon is the recipient of several awards, including, Clay Research Fellowship (2015-2020), Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize (2012, American Mathematical Society), Valedictorian, Princeton University (2011), George B Covington Prize (2011), Andrew H. Brown Prize (2010, Princeton), the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence (2009, Princeton), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2008) and Second Place, Intel Science Talent Search Competition (2007).
Dr. Pardon the BA degree in Mathematics from Princeton University in 2011, and the PhD degree in Mathematics from Stanford University in 2015. He joined the faculty at Stanford as an assistant professor in 2015. At age 27, Dr. Pardon became a Full Professor in the fall of 2016 at Princeton University.
