David Covert is firmly associated in my mind with the tradition I
started towards the end my tenure at the University of Missouri of
working with my PH.D. students at the Lakota coffee shop. This is an
absolutely wonderful place that always put a smile on my face when I
walked in. I often spend hours and hours in there, ordering a
bottomless cup of coffee and having a bagel and lox sandwich for
lunch. David and I typically met at the back of the coffee shop near
the giant coffee grinding machine and just worked on mathematics
together. We started the investigation of volume sets defined over
subsets of vector spaces over finite fields and developed methods
that were later successfully transferred to the Euclidean setting in
a series of papers with Allan Greenleaf and Mihalis Mourgoglou and
also with Allan Greenleaf and Krystal Taylor.
David Covert always impressed me with a thorough and comprehensive
nature of his approach to mathematics. This led him to write an
absolutely wonderful geometric combinatorics text a few years ago
that many of graduate and undergraduate students have used. He has
also co-advised two PH.D. students at the University of Rochester
while teaching a considerable load at the University of Missouri -
St. Louis.