Stony Brook University Professor John Pardon is a co-recipient of the New Horizon in Mathematics prize which is part of the Mathematics Breakthrough prizes that are awarded annually. This award is given to early-career researchers who have already produced important work in their fields. The prize will amount to $100,000.
Professor Pardon was recognized for his research that has produced a number of important results in geometry and topology, particularly in the field of symplectic geometry and pseudo-holomorphic curves, which are certain types of smooth surfaces in manifolds.
The Breakthrough Prize honors an esteemed group of the world’s most brilliant minds for impactful scientific discoveries, including a subset responsible for substantial progress in the understanding and treatment of major diseases. The Prize – popularly known as the “Oscars® of Science” – was created to celebrate the wonders of the scientific age by founding sponsors Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.
"That John has received this honor so early in his career is a testament of course to his own commitment to unraveling some of the mysteries of geometry and to the incredible research that is going on at the Simons Center and in the math department in the College of Arts and Sciences," said Carl W. Lejuez, executive vice president and provost. "John is an exemplary of what makes Stony Brook the state's top public university and a flagship. I sincerely congratulate him on his Breakthrough Prize."
“John Pardon has produced a broad spectrum of outstanding results in various areas of geometry and topology including as an undergraduate and PhD student. He co-created effective algebraic machinery for computation of symplectic invariants, which brought many new applications. Most recently, John proved a conjecture of Maulik, Nekrasov, Okounkov, and Pandharipande for a large class of complex three-dimensional manifolds, including all Calabi--Yau threefolds.” said Luis Alvarez-Gaume, director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics.
This is the fifth Breakthrough Prize for Stony Brook University's faculty. Previous to Professor Pardon, winners include C.N. Yang/Wei Deng Endowed Chair and Professor Alexander (Sasha) Zamolodchikov in 2024, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter van Nieuwenhuizen 2019, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy Chang Kee Jung and his group in 2016 and Professor Sir Simon K. Donaldson in 2014.