Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:
On a recent October morning, Rob Kirby stood in front of a roomful of mathematicians and told them not to feel bound by the way he’d done things in the past.
For the past half-century Kirby, 85, has been a central figure in low-dimensional topology, the study of deformable shapes. In addition to important research contributions, in 1978 he published the first version of what came to be known as “Kirby’s list” — a collection of 80 open problems that helped set the research agenda for the field over the next few decades. Two decades later, in 1997, he published a second, equally influential version of the list.
The few dozen mathematicians Kirby was addressing had convened at the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) in Pasadena to create a third version of the list.
More here.