Jon T. Pitts (1948–2024)[1] 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.[2]
He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1981.[3]
The Almgren–Pitts min-max theory is named after his teacher and him.[4]