Michael Shulman (mathematician)

Michael Shulman (1980) is an American mathematician at the University of San Diego who works in category theory and higher category theory, homotopy theory, logic as applied to set theory, and computer science. He did his undergraduate work at the California Institute of Technology and his postgraduate work at the University of Cambridge and the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 2009.

Work

Shulman's doctoral thesis and subsequent work dealt with applications of category theory to homotopy theory. In 2009 he received a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.^[1]

From September 2012 to April 2013 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study^[2] where he was one of the official participants in the Special Year on Univalent Foundations of Mathematics.^[3] Along with fellow researchers such as Andrej Bauer and Steve Awodey, Shulman was one of the principal authors of the book Homotopy type theory: Univalent foundations of mathematics,^[4] which summarized much of the work of the Special Year and has become a benchmark in the new field of homotopy type theory.^[5] In 2014 Shulman was part of a team headed by Steve Awodey that was awarded a $7.5M grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory for homotopy type theory.^[6]

Blogs

Shulman is a supporter of using web-based software systems such as GitHub to promote collaborative work by mathematicians — the six-hundred-page HoTT Book being a notable example. He is a prolific contributor to the nLab^[7] (and a member of its steering committee^[8]), and a co-host of the homotopy type theory blog^[9] and of the n-Category Cafe, a blog focusing on higher category theory.^[10]

Selected publications

• Michael Shulman; Synthetic Differential Geometry May 31, 2006
• Daniel Licata and Michael Shulman; Calculating the fundamental group of the circle in homotopy type theory January 15. 2013
• Benedikt Ahrens, Chris Kapulkin, and Michael Shulman; Univalent categories and the Rezk completion March 4. 2013
• Michael Shulman – In Cambridge Journals Special Issue: From type theory and homotopy theory to Univalent Foundations of Mathematics; Univalence for inverse diagrams and homotopy canonicity November 23, 2013
• John C. Baez and Michael Shulman; Lectures on n-categories and cohomology In Baez, John C.; May, J. Peter, eds. (2009). Towards Higher Categories. Springer. ISBN 1441915230. 

References

External links

• Shulman's home page at University of San Diego
• Michael Shulman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Michael Shulman: Papers
• Shulman postings to Homotopy Type Theory blog