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We give some background and biographical commentary on the postumous article that appears in this [journal issue | ArXiv] by Robert Riley on his part of the early history of hyperbolic structures on some compact 3-manifolds. A complete list of Riley's publications appears at the end of the article., Comment: 5 pages

I give my view of the early history of the discovery of hyperbolic structures on knot complements from my early work on representations of knot groups into matrix groups to my meeting with William Thurston in 1976. (This article was written by Robert Riley about ten years before his death in 2000 and never submitted for publication. An explanation of why it is being published now and some information about Riley and this article is given in the article by Brin, Jones and Singerman which accompanies this article in this issue of the [journal | arxiv].), 14 pages, 1 figure

We study an Anosov flow ∅ t in S 3 – \s{figure-8 knot\s}. Birman and Williams conjectured that the knot types of the periodic orbits of this flow could have at most two prime factors. Below, we give a geometric method for constructing knots in this flow with any number of prime factors.