David Matthew Ceperley (born 1949) is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC.

In his development as a leading mathematical and computational physicist Ceperley had a number of acknowledged mentors, many of whom happen to be his former supervisors such as Geoffrey Chester, Malvin Kalos, Joel Lebowitz and Berni Alder.

Ceperley not only applied Feynman's exact mapping of superfluid 4He onto classical ring polymers but also created the algorithms to make path integration a precise calculational tool to compare theory with experiment.

[4] He derived the exact expression for tunnelling splittings in complex systems and, by computing the exchange in quantum crystals, resolved the origin of magnetism in solid 3He.

[13] Richard Martin and Ceperley started the annual workshop series, Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods[14] in 1989.