James Munkres

Who is James Munkres?

James Raymond Munkres is a Professor Emeritus of mathematics at MIT and the author of several texts in the area of topology, including Topology, Analysis on Manifolds, Elements of Algebraic Topology, and Elementary Differential Topology. He is also the author of Elementary Linear Algebra.

He 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.

Among his contributions to mathematics is the development of what is sometimes called the Munkres assignment algorithm. A significant contribution in Topology is his obstruction theory for the smoothing of homeomorphisms. These developments establish a connection between the John Milnor groups of differentiable structures on spheres and the smoothing methods of classical analysis.