Gallery
© Copyright 1998 Geometry and Topology Monographs. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Left to right: Iz Singer, Rob Kirby and Saunders Mac Lane at the National Academy of Sciences Awards Ceremony, April 1995. On this occasion Rob received the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing for his first comprehensive problem list entitled Problems in low dimensional manifold theory (1976). The list was deemed by the NAS to be the closest thing to the kind of scientific reviews regularly published in other scientific disciplines. Mathematicians don't regularly write "reviews", and this problem list was recognized by the NAS as a comparable endeavor. The citation reads: "For his list of problems in low-dimensional topology and his tireless maintenance of it; several generations have been greatly influenced by Kirby's list."
The award was given in mathematics again in 2013 to Bruce Kleiner and John Lott. Their citation reads: "For their joint explication of Perelman's celebrated solution of the Poincaré Conjecture; the Kleiner/Lott presentation was instrumental in making the solution accessible to the mathematical community, and, as the first detailed scientific presentation, played a crucial role in the verification of the solution."
