John Pardon

A 2022 Clay Research Award was made to John Pardon of Princeton University in recognition of his wide-ranging and transformative work in geometry and topology, particularly his ground-breaking achievements in symplectic topology.   

Pardon’s work displays a remarkable clarity of vision, sustained through extensive projects in which he develops conceptually sophisticated theories that cast long-standing problems into settings where they become tractable. His novel treatment of the theory of moduli spaces of pseudo-holomorphic curves, leading to an elegant construction of virtual fundamental cycles and chains, provides a compelling example.

In a series of papers, Ganatra, Pardon and Shende developed a powerful and subtle descent theory for Fukaya categories, crafted to facilitate diverse applications. This theory has already led to significant advances in representation theory and mirror symmetry, as well as symplectic topology.

Photo by  Denise Applewhite