Michael Spivak
American mathematician (1940–2020)
Michael David Spivak (May 25, 1940 – October 1, 2020) was an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry, an expositor of mathematics, and the founder of Publish-or-Perish Press. Spivak was the author of the five-volume A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry, which won the Leroy P. Steele Prize for expository writing in 1985.
Biography
Spivak was born in Queens, New York. He received his Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) from Harvard University in 1960, and in 1964 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University under the supervision of John Milnor, with his thesis, On Spaces Satisfying Poincaré Duality. Afterwards, Spivak taught as a full-time Math Lecturer at Brandeis University, whilst writing Calculus on Manifolds: A Modern Approach to Classical Theorems of Advanced Calculus, which was later translated into Polish, Spanish, Japanese and Russian. In 1967, he won a year-long National Science Foundation fellowship to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, after which Spivak returned to Brandeis as Assistant Professor of Mathematics until 1970. In his last year as Assistant Professor, he published the first two volumes of "what would become a five-volume masterpiece with the daunting title, Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry." In 1985, Spivak received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for this five-volume set.
In 2004, Spivak lectured on elementary physics. Spivak's book, Physics for Mathematicians: Mechanics I (published December 6, 2010), contains the material that these lectures stemmed from and more. Spivak was also the designer of the MathTime Professional 2 fonts (which are widely used in academic publishing) and the creator of the TV series Science International.
“Michael Spivak” enters the record as american mathematician (1940–2020). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Michael, Spivak and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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