David Luce was born the son of Paul and Grace Luce in Youngstown, OH in 1936. He and his sister Nancy grew up in the family home in Struthers, Ohio, where his father served as a science teacher, and later a high school principal, and his mother a teacher. 

Perhaps due to having two parents who were avid teachers, David was an exceptional student from the start, excelling in mathematics and science, and served in the Science Club and also as yearbook editor. David was also avid basketball and football player in high school. In later years he would play badminton and then tennis, and then subsequently golf and racquetball, often trouncing the younger guys who challenged him.

While at Case Western Reserve, David met and in 1959 married Mary Jane Morehead (subsequently Maryjane Luce), an aspiring artist and journalism major from Jerome Michigan. They subsequently had three children, Benjamin, Andrea, and Tina, who are now a Ph.D physicist, a registered nurse, and a Ph.D. geologist, respectively.

David and Mary Jane often took their children to museums and art galleries, and took pains to expose them to science and art in general, and to nature. They also teamed up with close friends Philip and Mireille Clapp and together built a log cabin high on a mountain in Vermont, providing the children of both families with a rich experience in nature. David and Philip built the walls of the cabin with trees harvested on the property, while Mary Jane and Mireille gradually constructed the fireplace from stones scavenged from the area. The Cabin and a second dwelling constructed by the Clapps in later years remain as treasured retreats for both families. Interestingly, the fathers of both families were both physicists (as is Mireille), the mothers have both have had strong artistic careers, and both families have 3 children each, with oldest boys (Benjamin and Andre) also being physicists, the middle daughters (Andrea and Lisanne) both having careers in public service (nursing and teaching, respectively) and the youngest daughters (Tina and Michelle) both having professional expertise in hydrology related disciplines.

David and Maryjane also took the family skiing regularly, and a family journey around the country one summer in an old station wagon pulling a pop-up trailer remains a treasured memory.

Visits to and from other Luce Family relations in Ohio and Chicago (David’s parents, sister Nancy Singham, and her children Roy and Shanti Singham) were regular and treasured occurrences, as was also visits to and from Morehead family relations in Michigan (Mary Jane’s sister Beverly, and Beverly’s husband John, and their children Rick, Paul, Jane and Joe, and also Mary’s brothers Richard and Duke and family, and sister Gladys). Of special note were holiday celebrations with David’s parents in Youngstown  (playing bridge with Mom and Pop Luce-dummy did dishes), rich dinner table discussions with the visiting Singhams in Clarence, and summer visits to the DeMarsh lakeside cottage in Michigan).

David deeply loved and cared for his spouse and children, and also loved beautiful sunsets, wildlife, the family pets, his close friends and associates, and reading Science Magazine.  He was an avid bridge player, having learned the game from his parents while a teenager, and treasured his bridge friends in the Buffalo area. 

In his last years, besides his tireless efforts to complete his life’s work on the Ocular Response Analyzer, David also revelled in many deep scientific topics, with a special fascination for ideas connecting physics and life itself, such as Isaac Asimov's book "Life and Energy".

David is survived today by his sister Nancy Singham, his beloved wife, the artist and author Mary Jane Luce, his son Benjamin and wife Janice and their children Angus and Angela, his daughter Andrea and husband Abdelhaq, daughter Tina and husband Mark and their children Owen, Grace, and Harper, niece Shanti Singham and family, and nephew Roy Singham and family.

 David will be dearly missed and remembered as a loving father, and as the ardent seeker of truth and dedicated inventor that he was.

David Luce was in many ways a modern day Edison, as evidenced by his long list of scientific and engineering publications and patents, and his inventions that continue to make to a difference in the lives of people today. 
 
David was prolific in science and mathematics from an early age, and was an absolutely exceptional student throughout his educational years. He tinkered extensively in the basement with electronic devices during high school. With assistance from his brilliant mother, who taught herself higher mathematics in order to assist him, David mastered calculus before the end of high school. He was also active in many academic and athletic clubs, won many awards and scholarships, and was voted most likely to suceed in high school. And indeed he did!

A good idea of the immense breadth of David's R&D over six decades can be found by visiting https://scholar.google.com/ and searching under "David A. Luce".

Following high school, he received a B.S. in Physics in 1958 from Case Western Reserve University, and then a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in 1963.  His thesis at MIT, titled "Physical correlates of nonpercussive musical instrument tones", and his other works in the physics of musical tones at MIT, stand today as seminal contributions to the scientific understanding of musical tones. 

Upon graduation from MIT David extended his thesis work by undertaking R&D on new electronic synthesizers in a tiny lab near Boston owned by Melville Clark, an MIT professor. David built by hand much of the electronic equipment used in the lab and all of the circuitry in the synthesizers he developed there. During this period David developed a prototype of the first fully polyphonic synthesizer, and synthesizer circuits that could reproduce the tones of many traditional musical instruments quite faithfully. A patent relating to this work conveys a good sense of the comprehensive scope and achievements in this R&D work.   

After a brief stint at Sperry Rand, where he worked on high speed digital circuits, David joined Moog Music in 1972 at the invitation of Bob Moog to create a commercial polyphonic synthesizer. This resulted in the Polymoog, and several other related instruments. Some links describing the outcome of this, which had a significant impact on the world of music synthesizers, can be found at:
http://www.brain-salad-surgery.de/moog_constellation.html
https://www.facebook.com/moogpolymoog/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqnq0qRc2oQ

A video featuring a discussion of the polymoog by David can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_XE9HwPAgo 

A video of David discussing long-term friend Herb Deutsch can be found at:
https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/dave-luce

Following the Polymoog, David headed Engineering Department at Moog, then became president in 1981, and then a co-owner in 1984. In these capacities he was directly involved with and oversaw the development of many other instruments, including the Micromoog, the Mutlimoog, the Moog Taurus, the Moog Source, the Moog Liberation, and the Memory Moog. 

These were heady days for David and Moog Music. David regularly interacted with musicians such as Gary Numan, Keith Emerson of ELP, Chick Corea, Rick Wakeman, Patrick Moraz, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, and many others. 

Gradually, however, Moog and other analog synthesizer makers increasingly lost market share to each other and to the rapidly emerging digital synths of Yamaha and other companies, and Moog began to perform electronics contract work for other companies. 

The small company however, had (external) difficulties remaining afloat, and in 1987 Moog closed down, and David accepted a senior R&D position at American Optical, now called Reichert Technologies. Here he began research on the "Noncontact Tonometer", or NCT, a device which utizes the response of the eye to an air puff to measure the pressure in the eye as a means to detecting the potential onset of glaucoma. 

The NCT was originally invented by Bernie Grolman, with whom David became close friends. David continued R&D on the NCT, and in the year 2000 discovered a means to disentangle the effects of the viscoelasticity of the cornea from the pressure inside the eye, thereby vastly improving and extending the diagnostic capability of the instrument. David is credited worldwide with creating the concept of "Corneal Hysteresis."  With the scope of the instrument thus expanded beyond merely glaucoma prevention to a general diagnostic tool, the device was renamed the "Ocular Response Analyzer". A link to a video of David describing the development of the ORA can be found at:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BznyRRNh40RNY21YUE4xUmhpSU0 

Reichert began to market the ORA in 2005, and a paper David published on his discovery in 2005 has now become famous, garnering more than 750 citations, and has earned David wide recognition as the “Father of Corneal Biomechanics”.  

In recent years, with faithful support from his colleagues at Reichert, David worked tirelessly to perfect and gain acceptance for the ORA. These efforts succeeded, and as of 2015 US doctors can now receive Medicare reimbursement for testing patients on the device, providing eye care doctors greatly improved ability to more accurately detect glaucoma (and other eye disorders, such as keratoconus) in tens of thousands of patients, the second leading cause of irreversible blindness in the world.  His discovery has already led to new research studies all over the world, and Reichert is continuing to expand on Dave's discovery, so his legacy is ongoing through them.