The universal property of derived geometry
Abstract
I'll show how a simple universal property attaches a category of derived manifolds to any category with finite products and some suitable notion of "topology". Starting with the category of real Euclidean spaces and infinitely differentiable maps yields the category of derived smooth manifolds studied by D. Spivak and others, while starting with affine spaces over some ring and polynomial maps produces a flavour of the derived algebraic geometry of Lurie and Toen-Vezzosi.
I'll motivate this from the differentiable setting by showing that the universal property easily implies all of D. Spivak's axioms for being "good for intersection theory on manifolds".