麦克·斯皮瓦克

麦克·大卫·斯皮瓦克（Michael David Spivak，1940年5月25日—2020年10月1日），出生于美国纽约皇后区，是一位专精于微分几何的数学家、数学原理的解说者以及“出版或腐朽”出版社的创办人。他是五卷版微分几何综合导引一书的作者。他在约翰·米尔诺教授的指导之下，于1964年在普林斯顿大学取得他的博士学位。

他所著作的《微积分》一书，风格简明，在介绍入门微积分学时，注重严密性与理论性的方法，这本书通常用于大一微积分荣誉课程，使用的学校有：芝加哥大学、密歇根大学、都柏林三一学院、罗彻斯特大学、俄亥俄州大学、乔治亚大学、多伦多大学第一学年的分析课程、约翰霍普金斯大学、马里兰独立大学大一物理专业本科生的微积分课程、滑铁卢大学的进阶课程。

斯皮瓦克亦著有《使用TeX的快乐：一个美食家事的排版导引与AMS-TeX完整全套软件》以及《搭便车者式的微积分导引》。约翰·米尔诺有名的作品《莫尔斯理论》，是由斯皮瓦克与罗勃特·威尔斯的课堂笔记增补而成。斯皮瓦克所著的《流形上的微积分》一书亦广受赞赏。近来，斯皮瓦克进行了一系列关于基础物理的演讲。在微分几何领域中，其五册巨著 A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry （《微分几何的全面引论》）阐明了经典与现代微分几何之间的关系，将高斯与黎曼的经典著作“翻译”成以流形为核心概念的现代语言。斯皮瓦克因此作而获美国数学学会的1985年勒罗伊·斯蒂尔奖。

斯皮瓦克的每一本著作都隐藏向Yellow Pigs的参考，Yellow Pigs是他近来在酒吧与大卫·C·凯莱想到的一个点子。

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.

Spivak was gay. He met his partner, Michael Kramer, in 1997.

Spivak died on October 1, 2020.

Writing

His five-volume A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry is among his most influential and celebrated works. The distinctive pedagogical aim of the work, as stated in its preface, was to elucidate for graduate students the often obscure relationship between classical differential geometry—geometrically intuitive but imprecise—and its modern counterpart, replete with precise but unintuitive algebraic definitions. On several occasions, most prominently in Volume 2, Spivak "translates" the classical language that Gauss or Riemann would be familiar with to the abstract language that a modern differential geometer might use. The Leroy P. Steele Prize was awarded to Spivak in 1985 for his authorship of the work.

Spivak also authored several well-known undergraduate textbooks. Among them, his textbook Calculus takes a rigorous and theoretical approach to introductory calculus and includes proofs of many theorems taken on faith in most other introductory textbooks. Spivak acknowledged in the preface of the second edition that the work is arguably an introduction to mathematical analysis rather than a calculus textbook. Another of his well-known textbooks is Calculus on Manifolds, a concise (146 pages) but rigorous and modern treatment of multivariable calculus accessible to advanced undergraduates.

Spivak also wrote The Joy of TeX: A Gourmet Guide to Typesetting with the AMS-TeX Macro Package and The Hitchhiker's Guide to Calculus. The book Morse Theory by Spivak's PhD advisor John Milnor was based on lecture notes by Spivak and Robert Wells (as mentioned on the cover page of the booklet).

Spivak pronouns

Spivak employed the use of a set of English gender-neutral pronouns, e/em/eir, in his book The Joy of TeX, which are often referred to as Spivak pronouns. Spivak stated that he did not originate these pronouns.