David Mark (scientist)

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David Mark (October 7, 1947 – September 24, 2022) was a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University at Buffalo. He helped build Geographic Information Science (GIScience) and studied how people think about space and language.

Early in his career he taught at Simon Fraser University, the University of Ottawa, and the University of British Columbia, and he was an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario from 1978 to 1981. He joined the University at Buffalo in 1981, became an associate professor in 1983, a full professor in 1987, and was named SUNY Distinguished Professor in 2007. He authored or coauthored more than 230 papers, cited over 10,000 times.

Mark’s work explored the cognitive and linguistic foundations of geographic information. In the 1970s and 1980s, he helped develop early digital representations of terrain, including the Triangular Irregular Network (TIN). He is also known for a widely used water flow routing algorithm that cleans up spurious pits in digital elevation models.

In 1990, he organized a NATO Advanced Study Institute with Andrew U. Frank, which helped launch research in spatial cognition and linguistics within GIScience. With Barry Smith and others, he wrote influential papers on geographic categorization, reasoning, and the ontology of geographic features. In the early 2000s, Mark and Andrew Turk founded Ethnophysiography, studying how language and culture shape people’s intuitive concepts of the landscape. He continued to work on these topics, focusing on a foundational ontology of the landscape, until his death.