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James R. Munkres passed away on July 30, 2026, just a few weeks before his 96th birthday. Jim was a differential topologist and served on the MIT faculty from 1960 to 2000, and then continuing to teach until 2015 his signature subject, 18.901 Introduction to Topology, based on one of his textbook Topology: An Introductory Course.

His obituary can be viewed here.

SPUR/SPUR+ (Summer Program in Undergraduate Research) culminated with two teams sharing the 2026 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper.

Research conducted by Sam Zhang was mentored by Saba Lepsveridze and suggested by Nike Sun. The Prize was also awarded to Edward Li, with mentor Yonghwan Kim, a project suggested by Paul Seidel.

They were among 11 MIT undergraduates who presented 8 individual or joint research projects at the SPUR 2026 Conference to judges Ankur Moitra, Semyon Dyatlov, and Andrew Sutherland.

This summer's RSI (Research Science Institute) Symposium featured 11 exceptional high school students from around the world presenting their math research projects, as mentored by six graduate students, faculty advisors David Jerison and Jonathan Bloom, and head mentor Tanya Khovanova.

Our RSI students won best papers and best presentation awards at RSI 2026:

Nikola Veselinov won best paper, under the mentorship of Ayan Nath. Sylvia Lee also won best paper, mentored by Ashu Tripathi. Tony (Guanjie) Lu was awarded best presentation, mentored by Alexander McWeeney.

The 2026 Fields Medal winners have been announced this July 23rd at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM); they are Yu Deng, John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang. We are proud to report that two of them have received part of their mathematical training at MIT.

Yu Deng got his B.S. in mathematics at MIT in 2011, and was a Putnam Fellow in 2010. He is awarded his Fields Medal for his work in partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics. His first published paper (in Analysis & PDE) was on the latter topic, and stemmed out of summer research done at MIT on a problem suggested by Gigliola Staffilani. He is currently a Professor at U. Chicago.

Hong Wang got her Ph.D. at MIT in 2019 under the supervision of Larry Guth, Ph.D. MIT '05. She is awarded the Fields Medal for her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and other major advances such as the solution of the Kakeya problem in three dimensions (with Joshua Zahl). She is the 3rd woman ever to win a Fields Medal. She is currently a Professor at NYU and at IHES, Paris.

Read more at MIT News.