Robion Kirby
American mathematician
- Selman Akbulut
- Stephen Bigelow
- Tim Cochran
- David Gauld
- Robert Gompf
- Elisenda Grigsby
- Tomasz Mrowka
- Yongbin Ruan
- Martin Scharlemann
- Rob Schneiderman (mathematician)
- Michael Handel
Robion Cromwell Kirby (born February 25, 1938) is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in low-dimensional topology. Together with Laurent C. Siebenmann he developed the Kirby–Siebenmann invariant for classifying the piecewise linear structures on a topological manifold. He also proved the fundamental result on the Kirby calculus, a method for describing 3-manifolds and smooth 4-manifolds by surgery on framed links. Along with his significant mathematical contributions, he has over 50 doctoral students and is the editor of an influential problem list.[1]
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1965, with thesis "Smoothing Locally Flat Imbeddings" written under the direction of Eldon Dyer [de].[2] He soon became an assistant professor at UCLA. While there he developed his "torus trick" which enabled him to solve, in dimensions greater than four (with additional joint work with Siebenmann), four of John Milnor's seven most important problems in geometric topology.[3]
In 1971, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by the American Mathematical Society.
In 1995 he became the first mathematician to receive the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing from the National Academy of Sciences for his problem list in low-dimensional topology.[4] He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[5]
Kirby is also the President of Mathematical Sciences Publishers, a small non-profit academic publishing house that focuses on mathematics and engineering journals.
Books
- Kirby, Robion C.; Siebenmann, Laurence C. (1977). Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds, Smoothings, and Triangulations (PDF). Annals of Mathematics Studies. Vol. 88. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08191-3. MR 0645390.
- Kirby, Robion C. (1989). The Topology of 4-Manifolds. Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Vol. 1374. Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/BFb0089031. ISBN 978-3-540-51148-9. MR 1001966.[6]
References
- ^ Kirby, Rob, ed. (December 22, 1995), Problems in Low-Dimensional Topology (PDF), retrieved October 8, 2023
- ^ Robion Kirby at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Ferry, Steve. Lecture notes in geometric topology (PDF).
- ^ "NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 18 March 2011. Retrieved 27 February 2011.
- ^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-01-27.
- ^ Taylor, Lawrence R. (1991). "Review: Robion C. Kirby, The topology of 4 manifolds". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 24 (2): 466–471. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1991-16068-4.
External links
- Kirby's home page.
- Biographical notes from the Proceedings of the Kirbyfest in honour of his 60th birthday in 1998.
- Video Lectures by Kirby at Edinburgh
- v
- t
- e
Recipients of the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry
- 1964 Christos Papakyriakopoulos
- 1964 Raoul Bott
- 1966 Stephen Smale
- 1966 Morton Brown and Barry Mazur
- 1971 Robion Kirby
- 1971 Dennis Sullivan
- 1976 William Thurston
- 1976 James Harris Simons
- 1981 Mikhail Gromov
- 1981 Shing-Tung Yau
- 1986 Michael Freedman
- 1991 Andrew Casson and Clifford Taubes
- 1996 Richard S. Hamilton and Gang Tian
- 2001 Jeff Cheeger, Yakov Eliashberg and Michael J. Hopkins
- 2004 David Gabai
- 2007 Peter Kronheimer and Tomasz Mrowka; Peter Ozsváth and Zoltán Szabó
- 2010 Tobias Colding and William Minicozzi; Paul Seidel
- 2013 Ian Agol and Daniel Wise
- 2016 Fernando Codá Marques and André Neves
- 2019 Xiuxiong Chen, Simon Donaldson and Song Sun
Authority control databases  | |
|---|---|
| International |
|
| National |
|
| Academics |
|
| Other |
|
