John Pardon

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 received the 2012 Morgan Prize. He is a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics in Stony Brook, New York. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2026.

Early life Pardon's mother, Joyce Eileen Maggio Pardon, was a math teacher. She introduced him to basic arithmetic, trigonometry, and calculus. His father, William Pardon, was a mathematics professor at Duke University. In 2007, he placed second in the Intel Science Talent Search competition, with a generalization to rectifiable curves of the carpenter's rule problem for polygons. In the 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.

After high school, Pardon attended Princeton University, where, after his sophomore year, he began taking graduate-level mathematics classes.

In college, Pardon became fluent in Chinese. He participated in a Chinese-language immersion program at Princeton and represented the university in 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 and was the valedictorian of his class. He then went to Stanford University for his graduate studies. His accomplishments there included solving the three-dimensional case of the Hilbert–Smith conjecture. He completed his Ph.D. in 2015, under the supervision of Yakov Eliashberg. In 2015, he was also appointed to a five-year term as a Clay Research Fellow. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics in Stony Brook, New York. In 2023, he proved the Maulik–Nekrasov–Okounkov–Pandharipande (MNOP) conjecture, which posited an equivalence between two different curve enumeration invariants of Calabi–Yau threefolds. He is currently working on a book about the foundations of symplectic geometry.

Awards and honors In 2017, Pardon received the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award for his contributions to geometry and topology.

He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Also in 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro. In 2022 he was awarded the Clay Research Award. In 2025, he was awarded the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize.

Pardon was awarded the Fields Medal at ICM Philadelphia 2026 for "achievements in symplectic geometry including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of certain manifolds and counting holomorphic curves, and for his contributions to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory".

Selected publications