Jon T. Pitts (1948–2024) was an American mathematician who worked on geometric analysis and variational calculus. He was a professor at Texas A&M University.
Pitts was born on 10 January 1948. Pitts obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University 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 in 1981.
The Almgren–Pitts min-max theory is named after his teacher and him.
Pitts died on 30 May 2024.""JON T. PITTS *74"" Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 2024, p. 77.
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 & Camillo De Lellis: "The min-max construction of minimal surfaces"