David Gries (born April 26, 1939) is an American computer scientist at Cornell University, mainly known for his books The Science of Programming (1981) and A Logical Approach to Discrete Math (1993, with Fred B. Schneider).

He spent the next two years working as a programmer-mathematician for the United States Naval Weapons Laboratory, where he met his wife, Elaine.

While at Illinois, Gries worked with Manfred Paul and Ruediger Wiehle to write a full compiler for the language ALGOL 60 for the IBM 7090 mainframe computer.

[5][11] It was also one of the first textbooks to be written and produced using computers, in this case punched cards input to a text-formatting program that ran on an IBM System/360 Model 65;[5] the early technology used eventually resulted in the book having a somewhat dated appearance.

"[11] The textbook An Introduction to Programming: A Structured Approach Using PL/I and PL/C was co-written with his computer scientist college Richard W. Conway and published in 1973.

[17] A review in SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes found the book to be valuable in the logic and stratagem aspects, but too focused on low-level programming with no abstract data types discussed other than the simple array.

"[18] Similarly, a faculty member at Pepperdine University stated that, "My experience with A Logical Approach to Discrete Math convinced me that formal methods are easily mastered at the undergraduate level.