John Pardon

John Vincent Pardon (born June 1989) is an American mathematician and works on geometry and topology.^[1] 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 a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics in Stony Brook, New York and a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University.

John V. Pardon
Pardon receiving the 2017 Alan T. Waterman Award
Born	June 1989 (age 36) Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.
Alma mater	Stanford University Princeton University
Known for	Gromov's problem on distortion of knots Proof of the 3 dimensional case of Hilbert–Smith conjecture
Awards	Morgan Prize (2012) Alan T. Waterman Award (2017) Clay Research Award (2022) New Horizons in Mathematics Prize (2025)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Princeton University Simons Center for Geometry and Physics
Doctoral advisor	Yakov Eliashberg

Education and accomplishments

Pardon's first math teacher was his mother, Joyce Eileen Maggio Pardon. She introduced him to basic arithmetic, trigonometry, and calculus. His interest in math was also fostered through conversations with his father, William Pardon, who is a mathematics professor at Duke University. When he was a high school student at the Durham Academy in Durham, North Carolina he took classes at Duke.^[2]

John Pardon was a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, in 2005, 2006, and 2007.^[3] 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.^[4] He published this research in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 2009.

Next, Pardon went to Princeton University and after his sophomore year he primarily took graduate-level mathematics classes there.^[2] At Princeton, he 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. He 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 it earned him the Morgan Prize of 2012.^[2][5][6] Pardon 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 and was the valedictorian.^[2]

He 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,^[7] and continued at Stanford as an assistant professor. In 2015, he was also appointed to a five-year term as a Clay Research Fellow.^[8]

In the fall of 2016 he became a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University and is still there.^[9]

Awards and honors

In 2017, Pardon received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award for his contributions to geometry and topology.^[10]

He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.^[11] Also in 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. In 2022 he was awarded the Clay Research Award.^[12] In 2025, he was awarded the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize.^[13]

Selected publications

• Pardon, John (2009), "On the unfolding of simple closed curves" (PDF), Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 361 (4): 1749–1764, arXiv:0809.1404, doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-08-04781-8, MR 2465815, S2CID 230031
• Pardon, John (2011), "On the distortion of knots on embedded surfaces" (PDF), Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, 174 (1): 637–646, arXiv:1010.1972, doi:10.4007/annals.2011.174.1.21, MR 2811613, S2CID 55567836
• Pardon, John (2011), "Central limit theorems for random polygons in an arbitrary convex set", Annals of Probability, 39 (3): 881–903, arXiv:1003.4209, doi:10.1214/10-AOP568, MR 2789578
• Pardon, John (2013), "The Hilbert–Smith conjecture for three-manifolds" (PDF), Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 26 (3): 879–899, arXiv:1112.2324, doi:10.1090/S0894-0347-2013-00766-3, MR 3037790, S2CID 96422853
• Pardon, John (2016). "An algebraic approach to virtual fundamental cycles on moduli spaces of pseudo-holomorphic curves". Geometry & Topology. 20 (2): 779–1034. arXiv:1309.2370. doi:10.2140/gt.2016.20.779. MR 3493097. S2CID 119171219.
• Pardon, John (2019). "Contact homology and virtual fundamental cycles". Journal of the American Mathematical Society. 32 (3): 825–919. arXiv:1508.03873. doi:10.1090/jams/924. MR 3981989. S2CID 119335098.