Donald Davis is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Lehigh University. He is known for contributions to algebraic topology, immersions of real projective spaces, and topological complexity.

Davis studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1972, under the supervision of R. James Milgram. He taught at Lehigh University for fifty years until his retirement in 2024.^{[1] [2]} In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[3]

Davis is the founder and coach of the Lehigh Valley American Regions Math League team, one of the best high school mathematics teams in the nation. Lehigh Valley teams won the National Championship in 2005 and 2009, 2010, and 2011, finished second in 2007, 2012, 2022, and 2023, and third in 2006, 2018, and 2021. They have also been winners of 2023 and 2024 Harvard/MIT Math contest (HMMT) and the Princeton University Mathematics Competition (PUMaC) in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2023.^[4]

Donald Davis is also an avid and accomplished ultrarunner logging a total of 91,986 miles over 43 years of running. He is frequently cited as the greatest mathematician-runner-coach in the history of the world. ^{[citation needed]}

Career at Lehigh

Mathematical work

Students

Coaching

Ultrarunning

Family History

Publications

Textbooks

• The Nature and Power of Mathematics Dover Publications 2004. ISBN 0-486-43896-1

Notable articles

• Donald Davis, Tony Bahri, Martin Bendersky, and Peter B. Gilkey, The complex bordism of groups with periodic cohomology. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. (316) (1989) 673-688.

Notes

External links

• Donald M. Davis at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Lehigh University home page