Michael Shulman (mathematician)


Michael "Mike" Shulman 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.

Work

Shulman 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.
His 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.
In 2012–13, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was one of the official participants in the Special Year on Univalent Foundations of Mathematics. Shulman was one of the principal authors of the book Homotopy type theory: Univalent foundations of mathematics, an informal exposition on the basics of univalent foundations and homotopy type theory. 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.

Blogs

Shulman is a supporter of using web-based software systems, such as GitHub, to promote collaborative work by mathematicians—the six-hundred-page Homotopy type theory book being a notable example. He is a prolific contributor to the nLab, and a co-host of the homotopy type theory blog and of the n-Category Cafe, a blog focusing on higher category theory.

Selected publications