Person: Kirby, Robion Cromwell

Robion Kirby is an American mathematician who specialises in low-dimensional topology.

Of course, Kirby might have scraped in by the back door but he now needed to be able to fund his graduate studies.
With a letter of support from Mac Lane, Kirby was appointed as a teaching assistant at Roosevelt University, in Chicago.
First, Kirby had to pass the oral Ph.D. qualifying examination which required that he offer two topics on which to be tested.
Dyer was an algebraic topologist while Kirby's strengths came from his geometric intuition.
At one stage Kirby thought he had found a proof, but it soon proved to be incorrect.
Mac Lane suggested that this problem was too hard for a Ph.D. thesis so Kirby moved to another topic but continued to think about the annulus conjecture.
After the award of his doctorate, Kirby was appointed as an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Let us now look at the books that Kirby has published.
The book contains five essays all of which had existed in some form of other since 1970, describing the major breakthroughs that the collaboration between Kirby and Siebenmann produced beginning in 1968.
In 1989 Kirby published The topology of 4-manifolds in the Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics Series.
The techniques and objects emphasized here are framed links and the Kirby calculus, spin structures, and immersion methods.
Another aspect of Kirby's contributions that we should mention is his support for mathematics by bringing important issues to attention.

Born 25 February 1938, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Usa, Topology

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive