Jon T. Pitts

Jon T. Pitts (1948–2024) was an American mathematician working on geometric analysis and variational calculus. He was a professor at Texas A&M University.

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.

Selected publications

 * "Existence and regularity of minimal surfaces on Riemannian manifolds"
 * "Applications of minimax to minimal surfaces and the topology of 3-manifolds"
 * "Existence of minimal surfaces of bounded topological type in three-manifolds"