James Munkres

James Raymond Munkres (August 18, 1930 – July 30, 2026) was an American mathematician and academic who was professor of mathematics at MIT and is the author of several texts in the area of topology, including Topology (an undergraduate-level text), Analysis on Manifolds, Elements of Algebraic Topology, and Elementary Differential Topology. He is also the author of Elementary Linear Algebra.

Life and career Munkres completed his undergraduate education at Nebraska Wesleyan University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1956; his advisor was Edwin E. Moise. Earlier in his career he taught at the University of Michigan and at Princeton University. These developments establish a connection between the John Milnor groups of differentiable structures on spheres and the smoothing methods of classical analysis.

He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

Munkres died on July 30, 2026, at the age of 95.

Textbooks