Robion C. Kirby
I am a mathematical grandson of R. L. Moore, but have never taken nor taught a course by the Moore method, or so I used to think.
My Ph.D. adviser, Eldon Dyer, certainly knew the Moore method. He was, like Moore, an accomplished point set topologist, but he apparently had a change of heart when he discovered that the powerful tools of algebraic topology could drastically shorten (simplify?) some of his work. By the time I took a few courses from Dyer, circa 1960, he lectured clearly with great blackboard technique, but in a rather formal way. No hint he was a Moore student.
But looking back, I reverted a long way towards a somewhat Moore philosophy. I did not want a Ph.D. adviser who told me what to work on and what methods to use. Rather I wanted to choose my own problems and work on them in my own way. Much of what I needed to know came from a daily one hour session with a fellow grad student, Walter Daum, in which we read and chewed over papers and notes of Zeeman, Stallings, Smale, Haefliger and others (all higher-dimensional geometric topology)
Dyer let me follow my nose with appropriate encouragements now and then, and things worked out well enough. Would not Moore have approved of this story?
Later as an adviser of Ph.D. students, I gave my students free rein, encouraging them to find their own thesis problems, to learn by talking and working together, and by speaking in our weekly seminar. They mostly thrived in this Moore-like environment, and went on to good careers.
I didn't learn this from Moore or Dyer, but good ideas are discovered and rediscovered all the time, and I was only(!) five to six decades behind Moore.
