Nationality American Fields Mathematics | Name John Pardon | |
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Alma mater | ||
Residence United States of America | ||
John pardon 1 5 contact homology and virtual fundamental cycles
John Vincent Pardon (born June 1989) is an American mathematician who works on geometry and topology. He is primarily known for having solved Gromov's problem on distortion of knots, for which he was awarded the 2012 Morgan Prize. He is currently a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University.
Contents
- John pardon 1 5 contact homology and virtual fundamental cycles
- 89plus marathon 2013 marcus du sautoy and john pardon
- Education and accomplishments
- Selected publications
- References
89plus marathon 2013 marcus du sautoy and john pardon
Education and accomplishments
Pardon's father, William Pardon, is a mathematics professor at Duke University, and when Pardon was a high school student at the Durham Academy he also took classes at Duke. He was a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, in 2005, 2006, and 2007. In 2007, Pardon placed second in the Intel Science Talent Search competition, with a generalization to rectifiable curves of the carpenter's rule problem for polygons. In this project, he showed that every rectifiable Jordan curve in the plane can be continuously deformed into a convex curve without changing its length and without ever allowing any two points of the curve to get closer to each other. He published this research in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 2009.
Pardon then went to Princeton University, where after his sophomore year he primarily took graduate-level mathematics classes. At Princeton, Pardon solved a problem in knot theory posed by Mikhail Gromov in 1983 about whether every knot can be embedded into three-dimensional space with bounded stretch factor. Pardon showed that, on the contrary, the stretch factor of certain torus knots could be arbitrarily large. His proof was published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2011, and earned him the Morgan Prize of 2012. Pardon also took part in a Chinese-language immersion program at Princeton, and was part of Princeton's team at an international debate competition in Singapore, broadcast on Chinese television. As a cello player he was a two-time winner of the Princeton Sinfonia concerto competition. He graduated in 2011, as Princeton's valedictorian.
He went to Stanford University for his graduate studies, where his accomplishments included solving the three-dimensional case of the Hilbert–Smith conjecture. He completed his Ph.D. in 2015, under the supervision of Yakov Eliashberg, and continued at Stanford as an assistant professor. In 2015, he was also appointed to a five-year term as a Clay Research Fellow.
Since fall 2016, he has been a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University.
In 2017, he received National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award for his contributions to geometry and topology, the study of properties of shapes that are unaffected by deformations, such as stretching or twisting and for solving problems that stumped other mathematicians for decades and generating solutions that provide new tools for geometric analysis.