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TO P O LO GY

A New Agenda for Low-Dimensional Topology

By K E V I N H A R T N E T T

February 22, 2024

This past October, dozens of mathematicians gathered in Pasadena to create the third version of “Kirby’s list” — a
compendium of the most important unsolved problems in topology, the study of deformable shapes.

Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine; source: George M. Bergman/MFO

 O
n a recent October morning, Rob Kirby stood in front of a roomful of mathematicians and
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For the past half-century Kirby, 85, has been a central �gure in low-dimensional topology, the study of
deformable shapes. In addition to important research contributions, in 1978 he published the �rst
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 �eld over the next few decades. Two decades later, in 1997, he published a
second, equally in�uential 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. Not that all the problems on the
prior lists had been solved — most hadn’t — but many had gone out of style. While math is eternal,
the �eld is practiced by humans who follow fads, and many of the old questions weren’t considered as
interesting anymore.

“We think some sub�elds are prestigious and others are like, nobody cares about it.” said Maggie
Miller of the University of Texas, Austin, one of 14 editors of the list.

The conference was conceived by Daniel Ruberman of Brandeis University, who had been Kirby’s
student in the early 1980s, and Inanç Baykur of the University of Massachusetts, who was a
postdoctoral fellow under Ruberman. They wanted the list to be made up of hard and important
problems.

“It should be a problem that is su�ciently interesting that if a solution came out, it would have the
potential to change the �eld,” Miller said. Baykur added: “Maybe a small percentage can be solved in
the next two to three years.”
 Inanç Baykur of the University of Massachusetts and Daniel Ruberman of Brandeis University
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Courtesy of Inanç Baykur; Ann Borst

The ways mathematicians decide what is important have themselves changed in the half-century since
Kirby published his �rst list. Even if the truth or falsity of individual conjectures is a matter of objective
truth, ranking their importance is a subjective, social process. And that process looks very di�erent in
today’s globally interconnected world than it did in the 1970s. The story of the new list is the story of
those changes.

The Beginning of the List

Kirby’s own career started with a problem list. In 1963, as a graduate student at the University of
Chicago, he attended a conference in Seattle where the mathematician John Milnor presented a list of
the seven most important open problems in topology. The last problem was the annulus conjecture,
which states that the spaces between two appropriately de�ned spheres always takes the shape of an
annulus, which is the region between two concentric circles.

This is true for circles and normal, three-dimensional balls, but in higher dimensions — involving
pairs of spheres of �ve or six or any number of dimensions — surprising things happen. In 1969, while
an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kirby proved it’s true for dimensions
�ve and higher given some restrictions (the spheres have to be smooth in a particular mathematical
sense).

Based on that result, UCLA promoted him directly to full professor and doubled his salary. Two years
later, he won the prestigious Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry. Kirby attributes this early-career
success in part to the existence of the Milnor list, which provided him with a greater variety of projects
to choose from than he would have received from the people immediately around him in graduate
school.

“For those who like to work on problems and don’t necessarily want to do what their adviser tells them
to do, a problem list is valuable,” he said.

Kirby began assembling his �rst problem list in August 1976 at an American Mathematical Society
conference at Stanford University. He built the list over the next two years, through phone calls, letters,
and informal conversations with mathematicians at conferences he attended, and he published it as an
extended journal article in 1978.
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Fashions in math come and go. “We think some sub�elds are prestigious and others are like, nobody
cares about it.” said Maggie Miller of the University of Texas, Austin, one of 14 editors of the new list.

Do Pham for Stanford University

 As Miller puts it, “He just called everybody he knew on the phone.”
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The list contained about 80 problems organized into �ve chapters. The �rst four chapters were on one-
dimensional knots, two-dimensional surfaces, and three- and four- dimensional manifolds (spaces
like the surface of a sphere that appear �at locally but can have more complicated global structure). The
�fth chapter was for miscellaneous problems. Though Kirby consulted widely to pull the list together,
the �nal product was unmistakably his.

“I was more inclusive than exclusive,” Kirby said, but added, “I was pretty much the �nal arbiter.”

The Second List

The late 1970s were an auspicious time to create a problem list in topology. The �eld was small at the
start of the decade, and over the next 10 years it exploded. In 1981 Michael Freedman solved a four-
dimensional version of the Poincaré conjecture in a monumental proof that would take years to digest.
(The conjecture asks if mathematical objects that resemble spheres must in fact be spheres. The
answer, Freedman proved, is yes.) A year later William Thurston published the geometrization
conjecture, which classi�es some topological structures into geometric categories. The conjecture
brought tools from analysis (an advanced form of calculus) squarely into topology. That same year
Simon Donaldson introduced di�erential geometry (which combines calculus and geometry) into the
�eld with his work on four-dimensional manifolds.

“It’s hard to describe how fast the progress was. It was one of those great periods in mathematics, with
one revolution after another,” Ruberman said.

As a result of all this activity, Kirby’s list was nearly outdated within a few years. But building problem
lists wasn’t Kirby’s main occupation. It wasn’t until a conference at the University of Georgia in the
summer of 1993 that he decided to overhaul the list.

Kirby began collecting problems at the conference and continued the work over email, which was not in
common use when he’d put together the �rst list. As a result, the list sprawled. The �nal list contained
415 problems and was published as a book in 1997. Once the third list got underway, the second e�ort
retroactively came to be known as K2, as in the second version of Kirby’s list, and also as a nod to the
second-highest mountain in the world. The expanded format helped cement the second version of the
list as a touchstone and a scorecard. Solving a Kirby problem gets young mathematicians noticed.

“If you’re writing a letter of recommendation for someone and they’ve solved a Kirby problem, you
mention that in your letter,” said John Baldwin, a mathematician at Boston College who participated in
the workshop and is helping to edit the list.

Arunima Ray, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany who
attended the workshop, said one of the �rst things her doctoral adviser did after she passed her
qualifying exams in 2011 was to give her a copy of the K2 list, “to get a sense of the big problems that
people are interested in.”

Of course, decisions about what is important are in�ected by who is in the room making those
decisions. The Kirby lists re�ect a pedagogical philosophy that grew out of Kirby’s sociopolitical
worldview. He describes himself as a classical liberal and cites the 19th-century British philosopher
John Stuart Mill as an important in�uence on his thinking.
 “Classical liberals really did believe in liberty, free speech, and a light hand from the government, so
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that’s sort of my viewpoint,” he said. “In a little way that goes along with not telling my students what
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to do. It’s a little bit giving them free rein.”

Kirby infuses these beliefs into the way he thinks and talks about the math community. In 2021, along
with over 1,000 other California-based mathematical and scienti�c professionals, he co-signed an
open letter criticizing the state’s proposal to adopt a new K-12 math curriculum that would have made
social justice considerations more central to the way the state teaches the subject. The California
proposal has come under considerable criticism in the mathematics community for, among other
things, limiting the availability of advanced courses, and for de-emphasizing pre-calculus courses in
favor of “data science.”

In the 1970s, Rob Kirby created a list of central questions in topology that helped set the �eld’s agenda
for decades afterwards.

George M. Bergman/MFO
 Kirby has historically been a skeptic of the existence of structural biases in mathematics, including
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regarding the �eld’s gender imbalance. In the 1970s, about 10% of mathematicians were women; today
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almost 30% are, according to a 2020 report by the International Science Council.

In an article that he wrote in the 1990s, and which was submitted for publication in the Notices of the
American Mathematical Society but never published, Kirby made the case that these dismal numbers
were not the result of any bias in the �eld. “In my view, the smaller number of women in math is not
due to discrimination by men nor to any inherent inferiority in women, but rather is due to the simple
fact that more men than women choose to enter mathematics,” Kirby wrote.

To many mathematicians, the reality that few women enter the �eld is anything but a simple fact.
“Evidence suggests that there is a feedback e�ect here: because there are so few female professors,
female students can’t see a clear career path through mathematics, so they decide not to pursue a
Ph.D.,” wrote four prominent female mathematicians in 2022 in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
As the International Science Council report put it, after analyzing a dataset of hundreds of thousands of
published mathematical papers, “various structural and systemic factors must have a�ected the
careers of female mathematicians in ways di�erent from those of men.”

Kirby’s views are well known within the low-dimensional-topology community. I asked Kirby if he
thought that made it harder for women to participate in settings like the recent conference where he
had a prominent role. He said he didn’t know because, with the exception of one mathematician, no
one had ever brought it up with him.

Ray, who serves as the gender equality o�cer at the Max Planck Institute, said “I don’t think it shaped
the way the conference felt. I do think it shapes how he is viewed in the �eld of mathematics, but I
think in general we do separate the mathematics from the mathematician.”

A Communal E�ort

Just as it had after K1, low-dimensional topology advanced quickly following the release of K2. One
major development was the elaboration of Seiberg-Witten theory, which used ideas from physics to
distinguish between four-dimensional manifolds. By the late 2000s, the Kirby list was ready for
updating again.
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“The thing is, the �eld became much bigger since the 1990s, it became huge,” Baykur said.

This time the impetus for creating a new list came from Ruberman and Baykur. They began collecting
problems around 2013. But between their other obligations and the pandemic, it wasn’t until October
2023 that they managed to gather a group of topologists to meet in person. They wanted the third
version of the list to be more of a communal e�ort.

“The initial list was wonderful, I’m so glad it was there, but this new format is commendable in making
that a bit more open,” Ray said.

In late 2022, Kirby joined Baykur and Ruberman as a co-organizer of the conference. They invited
experts from the major areas of low-dimensional topology — corresponding to the same �ve-chapter
structure Kirby had used in earlier versions of the list — but tried to avoid inviting so many specialists
that no one had anything in common with anyone else.

Baykur and Ruberman did most of the organizing while Kirby took on more of a titular role.

“It’s kind of like Rob’s baby, you know, like he’s emotionally in charge. But Danny and Inanç handled
all the logistics,” Miller said.

On Monday, October 30, the group began work on the K3 list (as it was called for obvious reasons and
also in reference to K3 surfaces, which are important objects in topology).

The list re�ected ways in which low-dimensional topology had grown since K2. In the early 1990s the
work of Andreas Floer gave rise to new methods for sorting three-dimensional manifolds. By the end of
that decade those methods had blossomed into an entire area of study, Heegaard Floer homology, and
within that area there are now a number of di�erent approaches to distinguishing manifolds. Those
approaches should all be consistent with each other, but it’s not known for sure that they are, and K3
will include questions that aim to settle the matter.
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“If you’re writing a letter of recommendation for someone and they’ve solved a Kirby problem, you
mention that in your letter,” said John Baldwin, a mathematician at Boston College who is helping to
edit the new list.

Brittany Baldwin
 Kirby set up camp in the main lecture hall where the mathematicians gathered each morning, mostly
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avoiding the brainstorming sessions. On Tuesday morning Dave Gabai of Princeton University gave a
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lecture to the whole group on connections between the Schoen�ies conjecture and the Poincaré
conjecture, arguably the two most important open problems in smooth four-dimensional topology.

The Schoen�ies conjecture has a similar �avor to the annulus conjecture Kirby worked on in the 1960s.
It predicts that if two spheres di�er by one dimension (like a circle versus the surface of a ball), and you
embed the lower-dimensional one (the circle) into the higher-dimensional one (the surface of a ball),
the former always cuts the latter into the equivalent of two balls. This is clearly true when you etch a
circle onto a globe (as if to form the equator), but as with the annulus conjecture, it’s less clearly true in
higher dimensions.

Kirby found Gabai afterward, and the two talked for hours about the implications of Gabai’s talk. At
other points during the week Kirby spent time emailing his extensive network in the math community
for contributions to the list.

“In some ways it was rather similar to what he’d done in the previous lists,” Ruberman said. “He didn’t
tend to come into the rooms as much. [He’d] be emailing people, saying, ‘Someone at the workshop
said this, what do you think of that?’”

The War Room

On the last two days of the conference Baykur and Ruberman asked attendees to write up the problems
they’d compiled. It felt like a war room, as the mathematicians rushed to write summaries of the
problems they’d settled on before their �ights home.

“It really felt like when you’re in college, and you have homework due the next day, and everybody in
the class is in a room, and it’s 2 a.m.,” Miller said.

A shared document in which the mathematicians were compiling the list was nearly empty on
Thursday morning, but grew quickly with dozens of mathematicians editing at once. By Friday, the list
of problems was more than 250 pages long. The whirlwind experience was almost unrecognizable
compared to Kirby’s two previous e�orts.

“It made me feel old in the sense that back when I did K2, I did that over a period of two to three years. I
would sit down with a person and we’d sort of write the problem together,” Kirby said. “With K3, I was
only involved in a modest number of problems.”

Baykur and Ruberman hope to publish a list of some 400 problems by the end of the year, after
revisions and additions from topologists who weren’t at the Pasadena meeting. Baykur, Ruberman and
the other editors are still debating how frequently to update the list. They could extend the shelf life of
K3 by keeping an online version current, but they see drawbacks in doing so. The �rst two lists, Baykur
said, “were historical documents and it was extremely informative to see how they were looking at
things in the 1970s and 1990s, and how they thought about mathematics. I wanted to have a similar
contemporary document.”