Bressoud was born March 27, 1950, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.[1]
He became interested in mathematics in the seventh grade, where he had a teacher who encouraged him and gave him challenging problems. He attended Albert Wilansky's National Science Foundation summer program at Lehigh University between his junior and senior years in high school, where he also spent most of his time working on problems.[2]
He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1971.[3] When he started at Swarthmore he had not yet decided on a major, but after his first year he decided to get out of college as quickly as possibly and had no interest in graduate school, and the quickest way out was to major in mathematics.[2]
After graduating Bressoud became a Peace Corps volunteer in Antigua from 1971 to 1973, teaching math and science at Clare Hall School. While in Antigua he realized he missed mathematics, and kept working on it as a hobby.[2] After the Peace Corps he went to graduate school at Temple University,[2] and received his PhD in 1977 under Emil Grosswald.[4]
His focus at Penn State was mathematics research, but in the late 1980s he became more interested in teaching and writing textbooks, and he decided to make a move. He said in a 2008 interview, "I needed to be in a place that had a strong focus on teaching and a community of people for whom
teaching was what they were most interested in." He decided on a move to Macalester College in 1994, where he was DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics.[2] Since 2005 he has written a monthly online column for MAA titled "Launchings" that focuses on the CUPM (Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics) Curriculum Guide.[5]
Bressoud received several of the Mathematical Association of America's awards: the Distinguished Teaching Award for the Allegheny Mountain section in 1994,[6]
the Beckenbach Book Prize in 1999,[7]
and he was a George Pólya Lecturer from 2002 to 2004.[8]
Bressoud, David (2007). A Radical Approach to Real Analysis (2nd ed.). Washington: Mathematical Association of America. ISBN978-0-88385-747-2.
Bressoud, David (2008). A Radical Approach to Lebesgue's Theory of Integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Mathematical Association of America. ISBN978-0-521-71183-8.
Bressoud, David (2019). Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-18131-8.
^"Biographies of Candidates 2002"(PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 49 (8). Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society: 970–981. September 2002.