Robion Cromwell Kirby (born February 25, 1938) is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

Mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

who specializes in

low-dimensional topology In mathematics, low-dimensional topology is the branch of topology that studies manifolds, or more generally topological spaces, of four or fewer dimensions. Representative topics are the theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot theory, ...

. 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.

Career

He received his Ph.D. from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

in 1965, with thesis "Smoothing Locally Flat Imbeddings" written under the direction of . He soon became an assistant professor at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

. 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. In 1971, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. In 1995 he became the first mathematician to receive the

NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing is awarded by the United States National Academy of Sciences, U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) "to recognize authors whose reviews have synthesized extensive and difficult material, rendering a signific ...

from the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

for his problem list in low-dimensional topology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. In 2012 he became a fellow of the

. Kirby is also the President of Mathematical Sciences Publishers, a small non-profit academic publishing house that focuses on mathematics and engineering journals.

Books

* *

References

External links

*Kirby'
home page

from th
Proceedings of the Kirbyfest
in honour of his 60th birthday in 1998. *

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kirby, Robion 1938 births Living people Mathematicians from Illinois Scientists from Chicago 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American topologists University of Chicago alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences