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.