David Clay Heath (~1943 – 11 August 2011) was an American probabilist known for co-inventing the Heath–Jarrow–Morton framework to model the evolution of the interest rate curve.
He graduated from Elkhart High School in 1960 and earned his bachelor's degree from Kalamazoo College in 1964.
Heath obtained his PhD in 1969 under the supervision of Frank Bardsley Knight at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a dissertation titled 'Probabilistic Analysis of Hyperbolic Systems of Partial Differential Equations'.
In the late 1970s, he moved to Cornell University where he joined the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering.
In the late 1990s Heath moved to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he became the Orion Hoch Professor of Mathematical Sciences, and where he stayed until his retirement in 2006.