Robion Kirby - The Torus Trick

Rob, so how about telling us about the Taurus trick uh you know how you solved all these problems in topological manifolds and uh where it went from there . I was interested in the annual conjecture and thinking about it as a graduate student and got one little result for the proceedings of the AMS . Uh somewhere in there I had some crazy idea and wanted to show Dyer and Mlan was in the hallway and joined us and and the argument the argument by the way there was a mistake and then so then after that Mlan takes me aside sometime or other you know you know Rob the conjecture is kind of a hard problem for a thesis problem and uh well of course it was I mean I was thinking about it wasn't my thesis I was thinking about the but whenever I had an idea I thought about the end was conjecture. . Well, a couple things were sort of led . Uh, one was I'd heard of some work of Ed Canel in which he pointed out that if you had a bounded homeomorphism of Rn , bounded means that no point was moved more than a constant , then that was isotopic to the identity . And that was interesting because we didn't really have conditions on a homeomorphism that told you anything really unless it was smooth at a point PL and an open set or but if you didn't have those you couldn't do anything with a homeomorphism . So it's being bounded was something I knew recognized . It was easy an easy fact but it was a I certainly remembered it. And uh so then I'd been invited to the uh Georgia topology conference in summer of ' 67 and met some people and Dennis Sullivan and that was that was interesting