DA ALUMNI A LUMN I
Princeton University
John Pardon works on numerous math problems at once, moving between them as he makes or doesn’t make progress. “The most satisfying part of doing mathematics is to find a beautiful proof or a beautiful theorem. I can only hope that I have succeeded in a small way in this respect.”
John Pardon ’07 Receives Top National Award for Young Scientists John Pardon ’07 has received the National Science
Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the nation’s highest honor for scientists and engineers younger than 35. The award carries a five-year, $1 million grant. A professor of mathematics at Princeton University, Pardon was recognized for “revolutionary, groundbreaking results in geometry and topology” that “have extended the power of tools of geometric analysis to solve deep problems in real and complex geometry, topology and dynamical systems,” according to the prize citation. He was selected along with Baratunde Cola, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. Pardon explores problems in geometric topology — which is the study of properties of shapes that are preserved under continuous deformations — and related fields, including symplectic geometry, differential geometry and low-dimensional topology. He was valedictorian of Princeton’s Class of 2011 and joined Princeton’s faculty in 2016 after serving as an assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Pardon established himself as an accomplished mathematician from an early age. While at Durham Academy, he took math courses at Duke University and excelled in numerous national and international math competitions, including winning a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in three consecutive years. During his senior year at DA, he published his first paper, which generalized a previous solution to the carpenter’s rule problem in discrete geometry to closed curves. The paper won second place in the 2007 Intel (now Regeneron) Science Talent Search.
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During his senior year at Princeton, he wrote a paper that presented a solution to a knot-theory problem presented by mathematician Mikhail Gromov in 1983. Pardon’s solution was published in the journal Annals of Mathematics and brought him the 2012 Morgan Prize, which is considered one of the highest mathematics honors for undergraduates. Pardon attributes his devotion to math to the elegance the discipline can exhibit. His current projects include counting intersections in certain high-dimensional spaces, for which he has developed a framework for defining intersection numbers. “My main personal motivation to work on problems in mathematics is aesthetic,” Pardon said. “The most satisfying part of doing mathematics is to find a beautiful proof or a beautiful theorem. I can only hope that I have succeeded in a small way in this respect.” Pardon works on numerous problems at once, he said, moving between them as he makes progress — or doesn’t, he said. “Most of the time I spend working on a problem is spent being frustrated and/or unable to make progress,” he said. “At such times, it is helpful to have a number of different problems in mind, and the wide diversity of problems in different areas of mathematics is another aspect of the field I find attractive and enjoyable.” Pardon received his doctorate in mathematics from Stanford in 2015. That same year, he was appointed a Clay Research Fellow through the Clay Mathematics Institute based in Oxford, United Kingdom. Outside of mathematics, Pardon is an accomplished cellist, having played the instrument since he was 6. He also is fluent in Chinese, which he studied while at Princeton. Editor’s note: This article is adapted from an article written by Morgan Kelly of the Office of Communications at Princeton University.