John Pardon Awarded 2025 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize

Stony Brook University Professor John Pardon is one of three recipients of the New Horizons in Mathematics prize, which is part of the annual Breakthrough Prizes, popularly known as the “Oscars® of Science.”

This award is given to early-career researchers who have already produced important work in their fields. The prize will amount to $100,000.

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 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, Stony Brook University 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.

Members of the Stony Brook University Department of Physics and Astronomy were among the recipients of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in recognition of their experimental collaborations with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).