Dave Bayer

David Allen Bayer is an American mathematician known for his contributions in algebra and symbolic computation and for his consulting work in the movie industry. He is a professor of mathematics at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Bayer was educated at Swarthmore College as an undergraduate, where he attended a course on combinatorial algorithms given by Herbert Wilf. During that semester, Bayer related several original ideas to Wilf on the subject. These contributions were later incorporated into the second edition of Wilf and Albert Nijenhuis' influential book Combinatorial Algorithms, with a detailed acknowledgement by its authors. Bayer subsequently earned his PhD at Harvard University in 1982 under the direction of Heisuke Hironaka with a dissertation entitled The Division Algorithm and the Hilbert Scheme. He joined Columbia University thereafter.

Bayer has worked in various areas of algebra and symbolic computation, including Hilbert functions, Betti numbers, and linear programming. He has written a number of highly cited papers in these areas with other notable mathematicians, including Bernd Sturmfels, Jeffrey Lagarias, Irena Peeva, and David Eisenbud.

Bayer was a mathematics consultant for the film A Beautiful Mind, the biopic of John Nash, and also had a cameo as one of the "Pen Ceremony" professors.