Michael Spivak

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael David Spivak (* 1940 in Queens ) is an American mathematician who deals with differential geometry and topology and is known in the USA for his textbooks.

Michael Spivak 1974

Spivak received his doctorate in 1964 from John Milnor at Princeton University with the dissertation On Spaces Satisfying Poincaré Duality . He then went to Brandeis University for a while . In 1968/69 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . He is best known for several textbooks, first the very extensive five-volume Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry (3rd edition 1999), in which he also goes into detail on historical references ( Carl Friedrich Gauß , Bernhard Riemann , with a translation of their famous works) and which appeared in the publisher Publish-or-Perish-Press , which he founded. He is best known for his widely used Calculus textbook (3rd edition 1994) and his brief book on analysis in several variables Calculus on Manifolds (1965). He also wrote a book on AMS-TeX ( The Joy of TeX: A Gourmet Guide to Typesetting with the AMS-TeX Macro Package , 1990) and A Hitchhikers Guide to Calculus (1995).

In 1985 he won the Leroy P. Steele Prize .

Others

Spivak tends to hide a reference to yellow pigs and the number "17" in his books.

In some of his books he also uses “Spivak Pronouns” to address a person in a gender-neutral way (instead of “he”, “she” just “e” etc.). He explains their use in the preface of his TeX book, in which he does not use them.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Milnor's famous book Morse Theory is based on transcripts of his lectures by Spivak and Robert Wells.
  2. ↑ The name comes from a slogan which, taken seriously, expresses the compulsion of scientists at US universities to publish regularly or to lose their jobs.
  3. ↑ Michael Spivak: The Joy of TeX . 2nd edition, American Mathematical Society, 1990, ISBN 0-8218-2997-1 (AMS-TeX manual in English, published on CTAN in January 2019 ).
  4. ↑ 17 (Seventeen) and Yellow Pigs. Retrieved February 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Spivak, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spivak, Michael David (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Queens , New York City , New York