Michael Spivak

Michael David Spivak ( born 1940 in Queens ) is an American mathematician who is engaged in differential geometry and topology, and is known in the U.S. for his textbooks.

Spivak received his doctorate in 1964 at John Milnor at Princeton University with a dissertation on Spaces Satisfying Poincaré Duality. After that, he was for a time at Brandeis University. In 1968/69 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is primarily known for several textbooks, first the very comprehensive five-volume Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry ( 3rd edition 1999), in which he also details historical references (Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, with translation of their famous works) is received and which he founded the publishing house to publish or Perish Press appeared. But he is best known for his much-used calculus textbook ( 3rd edition 1994) and his tight book on Analysis in several variables Calculus on Manifolds (1965). He also wrote a book on 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 maintains accommodate in his books in a hiding place notes on a yellow pigs ( pigs yellow ) and the number "17".

He uses in some of his books as " Spivak Pronouns " to style a person gender-neutral (instead of "he", "she" simply " e", etc.). Their use, he explained in the preface of his TeX book in which he but not used.