Stony Brook University Professor John Pardon is a recipient of the New Horizons in Mathematics Breakthrough Prize, a segment of the annual Breakthrough Prizes often referred to as the "Oscars of Science." This accolade is awarded to early-career researchers who have already made significant contributions within their fields, and comes with a $100,000 prize.
Pardon's work, which has yielded substantial results in geometry and topology, particularly in symplectic geometry and pseudo-holomorphic curves, gained him this recognition. These curves are specific kinds of smooth surfaces in manifolds. The Breakthrough Prize lauds a select group of the world's foremost intellectuals for meaningful scientific advancements, including those responsible for significant developments in understanding and treating major diseases. Initiated by founding sponsors Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, the Prize acknowledges the marvels of the scientific era.
Carl W. Lejuez, Stony Brook University executive vice president and provost, remarked, "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. 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."
Luis Alvarez-Gaume, director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, stated, "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."
This award marks the fifth Breakthrough Prize for Stony Brook University’s faculty. Other notable winners have included C.N. Yang/Wei Deng Endowed Chair and Professor Alexander (Sasha) Zamolodchikov in 2024, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter van Nieuwenhuizen in 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.