David James Foulis (July 26, 1930- April 3, 2018) was an American mathematician known for his research on the algebraic foundations of quantum mechanics.
He spent much of his career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,[1][2] retiring in 1997 but continuing to be very active in mathematics as professor emeritus.
As a teenager he moved with his family to Florida, and he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Miami with a degree in physics in 1952.
[1][2][7] Foulis's doctoral students at Massachusetts have included DIMACS associate director Melvin Janowitz, graph theorist David Sumner, and mathematics and statistics educator and textbook author Patti Frazer Lock.
[5] The most highly cited of Foulis's research papers is "Effect algebras and unsharp quantum logics" (Foundations of Physics, 1994) which he wrote with his former student and later University of Massachusetts colleague Mary K. Bennett.