- Robion Kirby
Robion Cromwell Kirby (born 1938) is a
Professor ofMathematics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley who specializes inlow-dimensional topology . He coinvented the Kirby–Siebenmann invariant for classifying thePL-structure s on atopological manifold and proved the fundamental result on theKirby calculus , a method for describing3-manifolds and smooth4-manifold s by surgery onframed link s. Along with his significant mathematical contributions, he is an influential figure in the field, with over 50 doctoral students and his famous problem list.He was born in 1938 and received his PhD from the
University of Chicago in 1965. He soon became an assistant professor atUCLA . While there he developed his "torus trick " which enabled him to prove in dimensions greater than four (with additional joint work withLarry Siebenmann ), four of Milnor's seven most important problems in geometric topology. Consequently, in 1971, he was awarded theOswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by theAmerican Mathematical Society .In 1995 he became the first mathematician to receive the
National Academy of Science 's Award for Scientific Reviewing for his problem list in low-dimensional topology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.Books
* [http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/haupt/ks76.pdf "Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds, Smoothings, and Triangulations."] by Robion C. Kirby, Laurence C. Siebenmann ISBN 0-691-08191-3
*"Topology of 4-Manifolds" by Robion C. Kirby ISBN 0-387-51148-2External links
*Kirby's [http://math.berkeley.edu/~kirby/ home page] .
*Kirby's [http://math.berkeley.edu/~kirby/problems.ps.gz list of problems in low dimensional topology] . (This is a large 380 page gzipped ps file.)
* [http://www.msp.warwick.ac.uk/gtm/1999/02/biog.html Biographical notes] from the [http://dx.doi.org/10.2140/gtm.1999.2 Proceedings of the Kirbyfest] in honour of his 60th birthday in 1998.
*MathGenealogy |id=6539
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