I am an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, and Statistics at the University of Missouri - Saint Louis.
I am currently serving as the Director of Undergraduate Mathematics, and I am one of the departmental advisors in mathematics (along with Qiang Dotzel and Ilgin Sager). Email me (covertdj@umsl.edu) to find out more information about our department or for assistance with degree planning.
I regularly teach a wide variety of courses at UMSL. You can find a list of classes taught here, and I keep a handful of my lecture notes from various courses here. You can find some videos I've posted at youtube.com/@davidcovertmath.
In Fall 2025, I am teaching:
My book "The Finite Field Distance Problem" was published in 2021. It appears in the Carus Mathematical Monographs Series of AMS Books.
The book brings together numerous resources on this fascinating unsolved problem. The main problem discussed in the book is a finite field variant of Erdos' distinct distances problem from 1946. Despite the original distance problem of Erdos having been solved in 2011, the finite field analogue remains tantalizing unsolved, yet accessible even to undergraduate students!
My research involves the interplay of combinatorics, geometry, number theory, and harmonic analysis. I am largely interested in problems that say in one form or another that a sufficiently large set has nice additive or geometric structure.
I study problems such as the finite field distance problem, finite point configurations, and sum-product phenomena. I am also interested in certain aspects of algebraic coding theory such as Steiner and Kirkman systems.
I am the faculty advisor the Math Club. Click here for a list of Math Club events and more.