John Pardon Wins the 2026 Fields Medal for Work in Symplectic Geometry | Quanta Magazine
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The Quietest Mathematician Has Always Been Worth Listening To
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2026 Fields and Abacus Medals
The Quietest Mathematician Has Always Been Worth Listening To
By
Konstantin Kakaes
July 23, 2026
John Pardon sees connections between different areas of math that others don’t. For that vision, he’s now been awarded a Fields Medal.
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John Pardon is known to his colleagues and students as quiet but insightful. As one formerstudent put it, “You really have to go fishing for his knowledge.”
Phil Yam
Introduction
By Konstantin Kakaes
Contributing Writer
July 23, 2026
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2026 Fields and Abacus Medals
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knot theory
mathematics
symplectic geometry
topology
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Several eminent mathematicians tell different versions of the same story about John Pardon.
Fifteen years ago, János Kollár was seated next to Pardon at a Phi Beta Kappa dinner. Kollár held an endowed chair as a full professor at Princeton University, where he’d been teaching for over a decade after stints at the University of Utah and at Harvard University as a member of its Society of Fellows, arguably the country’s most prestigious postdoctoral fellowship. Which is to say, Kollár is not bad at math. Pardon was an undergraduate, a few months into his senior year.
Kollár had gotten stuck on a question in the field of topology. At the dinner, he mentioned it to Pardon in passing. Two weeks later, he got an email from Pardon — with the solution. “And it’s not just that he solved the question I needed, but he did a much more general case in a very nice way,” Kollár recalled. He found working with the 21-year-old a pleasure. It felt, he said, “like working with a postdoc who had very good ideas.”
When Pardon graduated the following May, it was at the top of the Princeton class. In his valedictory address, he asked his fellow graduates, rhetorically, “When is the last time you had a truly original idea?” He proceeded to answer his own question: “The single most basic form of expression that humans draw upon is imitation of others, and so I think having an original idea may qualify you as being partially insane.”
By young Pardon’s definition, present-day Pardon, who turned 37 in June, is more than a little crazy, in that he has had not one but many original ideas. For these, the International Mathematical Union has now awarded him the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in math. “He started off solving well-known spectacular problems,” said Tobias Ekholm of Uppsala University. “At a slightly older age, he’s doing this same spectacular work, but he has this ability: He solves a famous problem but does it in a way that creates a framework, a whole new package, that will be useful to other people.”
He is silent, but he says very useful things.
Barış Kartal
Pardon, now at Stony Brook University in New York, is not particularly prolific. “His publication list is not very long,” said Kai Cieliebak of the University of Augsburg. “But every paper he wrote is some kind of breakthrough paper. All of them appeared in very top high-level journals.” Furthermore, Cieliebak said, Pardon “has done work in really a whole number of, to my understanding, completely separate areas of math. Probably somewhere in his brain these things might be connected.” As his former student Mohan Swaminathan, now at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, put it, “If John has a problem, he goes really deep and learns whatever is necessary for it.”
Pardon is tall and quiet. He has a gentle, unassuming affect and a reputation for kindness. He’s likely to be the best mathematician in any room he walks into, but he wears this lightly. He’s helpful to colleagues, sporadically answering graduate students’ questions on the online bulletin board MathOverflow. He sometimes weighs in on other subjects as well, with an invariable polite decisiveness. When one user, exasperated by their inability to make restaurant-quality pancakes, asked for help, Pardon offered advice: “The difference between...