Jon T. Pitts (1948–2024) was an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

who worked on

geometric analysis Geometric analysis is a mathematical discipline where tools from differential equations, especially elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), are used to establish new results in differential geometry and differential topology. The use of ...

and

variational calculus The calculus of variations (or variational calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions t ...

. He was a professor at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, TA&M, or TAMU) is a public university, public, Land-grant university, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas, United States. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of ...

. Pitts was born on 10 January 1948.https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/jon-t-pitts-74 Pitts obtained his Ph.D. from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

in 1974 under the supervision of Frederick Almgren, Jr., with the thesis ''Every Compact Three-Dimensional Manifold Contains Two-Dimensional Minimal Submanifolds''. He received a

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in 1981. The

Almgren–Pitts min-max theory In mathematics, the Almgren–Pitts min-max theory (named after Frederick J. Almgren, Jr. and his student Jon T. Pitts) is an analogue of Morse theory for hypersurfaces. The theory started with the efforts for generalizing George David Birkhoff's m ...

is named after his teacher and him. Pitts died on 30 May 2024.

Selected publications

*''Existence and regularity of minimal surfaces on Riemannian manifolds''. Vol. 27. Mathematical Notes. Princeton, NJ; University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo: Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. iv+330. . *"Applications of minimax to minimal surfaces and the topology of 3-manifolds" *"Existence of minimal surfaces of bounded topological type in three-manifolds"

References

External links

Home page of Jon T. Pitts at the Texas A&M University
*

Tobias Colding Tobias Holck Colding (born 1963) is a Danish mathematician working on geometric analysis, and low-dimensional topology. He is the great grandchild of Ludwig August Colding. Biography He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to Torben Holck Colding ...

Camillo De Lellis Camillo De Lellis (born 11 June 1976) is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of calculus of variations, hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, geometric measure theory and fluid dynamics. He is a permanent faculty member in ...

:
The min-max construction of minimal surfaces
1948 births 2024 deaths Academics from Austin, Texas Princeton University alumni American geometers Variational analysts Texas A&M University faculty Sloan Research Fellows 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians {{US-mathematician-stub