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Michael Spivey

computer scientist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 20, 2025
Entity authorityQ14946959 ↗
Source-derived summary

Michael Spivey (commonly known as Mike Spivey) is a British computer scientist at the University of Oxford.

Spivey was born in 1960 and educated at Archbishop Holgate's Grammar School in York, England. He studied mathematics at Christ's College, Cambridge and then undertook a DPhil in computer science on the Z notation at Wolfson College, Oxford and the Programming Research Group, part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory.

Mike Spivey is a University Lecturer in Computation at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and Misys and Anderson Fellow of Computer Science at Oriel College, Oxford. His main areas of research interest are compilers and programming languages, especially logic programming. He wrote an Oberon-2 compiler.

Publications

Understanding Z: A Specification Language and its Formal Semantics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, No. 3, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-05414-0.

The Z Notation: A reference manual, Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science, 1992.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Michael Spivey” as computer scientist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Michael, Spivey and computer.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1960, 2008, 1992—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1960-01-01. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Michael, Spivey and computer providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Michael Spivey”, the useful work is to connect “computer scientist” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q14946959. VIAF identifies the subject as 85217999. The Library of Congress control number is n87944559. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 2008 and 1992.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Michael Spivey”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Michael Spivey primary sources, Michael Spivey archive and Michael research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Michael Spivey”?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Michael Spivey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.