Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Dave split his growing-up years about equally in Brooklyn and in Silver Spring, Maryland. He had an early exposure to and fascination with chess, and is a fairly strong player, having played two years for the U of Md. Twenty-two years after college were spent as a computer programmer with specialties in IBM mainframe assembler and data entry applications. He has written programs to compute peoples’ taxes and done statistical analysis of potential defalcation. But all that was before the '90s. Dave moved to the Fort Myers-Cape Coral area where other family members had migrated. He then decided to pursue a math masters when he learned of the intent to found FGCU. He says he really likes helping students with math. If he hadn't become an engineer/computer programmer and then a mathematician, he believes he would have liked to have been an archeologist.