Michael David Spivak[1] (May 25, 1940 – October 1, 2020)[2][3] 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.

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.

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.