Meet John Pardon, one of the recipients of the 2026 Fields Medals.
With no Nobel Prize for mathematics, the Fields Medal is one of two awards (alongside the Abel Prize) that carry a similar level of prestige. Yet this award is not given just for outstanding achievements that have already been made. Given that Fields Medals are only handed out to mathematicians under the age of 40, its other purpose is to highlight mathematicians’ potential for making significant contributions in the future.
John Pardon, of Stony Brook University in New York, is one of four recipients of this year’s Fields Medal (alongside Yu Deng, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang). Pardon developed an interest in knot theory early, eventually leading him to explore how the intrinsic topology of mathematical spaces can be understood through invariants derived from physical theories.
In July 2026, Pardon received the Fields Medal for “his achievements in symplectic geometry including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of certain manifolds and counting holomorphic curves, and for his contributions to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory.” This week on the HLFF Blog, Ben Skuse takes a look at some of Pardon’s research interests and accomplishments: Unpicking the Links Between Knots and Quantum Theory
Image caption: 2026 Fields Medal recipient John Pardon. Image credits: Badge / HLFF.