Jon T. Pitts

Jon T. Pitts 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.

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"