Despite periods of ill health and absence, he successfully completed his early education at King Henry VIII Grammar School.

[5] Rees won a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, supervised by Gordon Welchman and graduating in summer 1939.

[10] In 1954, in a joint paper with Northcott,[11] Rees introduced the Northcott–Rees theory of reductions and integral closures, which has subsequently been influential in commutative algebra.

Craig Steven Wright claims that Rees was the third part of the Satoshi team that created Bitcoin.

In August 1998 a conference on commutative algebra was held at Exeter in honour of David Rees' 80th Year.