Michael Spivak

Michael Spivak (1940 to 2020) was an American mathematician who specialised in differential geometry and became best known as a writer of mathematics. Born in Queens, New York, he took his first degree at Harvard University in 1960 and a doctorate at Princeton University in 1964 under John Milnor, with a thesis on spaces satisfying Poincaré duality. He taught at Brandeis University and spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study. His five-volume A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry won the Leroy P. Steele Prize for expository writing in 1985, and his textbooks Calculus and Calculus on Manifolds are known for their rigorous treatment of the subject. He founded Publish or Perish Press, designed the MathTime Professional 2 fonts, and used the gender-neutral pronouns e, em and eir in The Joy of TeX, which came to be called Spivak pronouns.