Professor John Pardon has received a National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, which is the nation's highest honor for scientists and engineers younger than 35. The prize carries a five-year, $1 million grant.Pardon was recognized for "revolutionary, groundbreaking results in geometry and topology" that "have extended the power of tools of geometric analysis to solve deep problems in real and complex geometry, topology and dynamical systems," according to the prize citation. He was selected along with Baratunde Cola, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech.
Pardon is the sixth Princeton faculty member — three of whom are in mathematics — to have received the Waterman Award: Charles Fefferman, the Herbert E. Jones, Jr. '43 University Professor of Mathematics (who received the inaugural award in 1976); William Thurston, a mathematics professor who later went to Cornell University (1979); Edward Witten, a physics professor now at the Institute for Advanced Study (1986); Gang Tian, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics (1994); Dalton Conley, the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology (2005); and Mung Chiang, the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering (2013). Terrence Tao, who received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1996, won the Waterman Award in 2008.