Background
He was born in Oak Park, Illinois to W. Curtis and Margaret Wasson Heath.
He was born in Oak Park, Illinois to W. Curtis and Margaret Wasson Heath.
He graduated from Elkhart High School in 1960 and earned his Bachelor degree from Kalamazoo College in 1964. Heath obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in 1969 under the supervision of Frank Bardsley Knight at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a dissertation titled "Probabilistic Analysis of Hyperbolic Systems of Partial Differential Equations".
Scientific career After graduation, he became an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. In the late 1970s, he moved to Cornell University where he joined the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. There he founded the financial engineering program, becoming the Merrill Lynch Professor of Financial Engineering.
In the late 1990s Heath moved to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he became the Orion Hoch Professor of Mathematical Sciences, and where he stayed until his retirement in 2006.
Heath, David, and William Heath, David, and William.