David Hestenes

After a decade of education research to develop and validate the approach, Hestenes was awarded grants from the National Science Foundation for another decade to spread the Modeling Instruction Program nationwide. As of 2011, more than 4000 teachers had participated in summer workshops on modeling, including nearly 10% of the United States' high school physics teachers. It is estimated that Modeling teachers reach more than 100,000 students each year.

In 1983 he joined with entrepreneur Robert Hecht-Nielsen and psychologist Peter Richard Killeen in conducting the first ever conference devoted exclusively to neural network modeling of the brain. In 1987, he became the first Visiting Scholar in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (Boston University) and worked on neuroscience research for a period.

In 1980 and 1981 as a NASA Faculty Fellow and in 1983 as a NASA Consultant he worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on orbital mechanics and attitude control, where he applied geometric algebra in development of new mathematical techniques published in a textbook/monograph New Foundations for Classical Mechanics.

Since 1980, Hestenes has been developing a Modeling Theory of science and cognition, especially to guide the design of science instruction. The theory distinguishes sharply between conceptual models that constitute the content core of science and the mental models that are essential to understand them. Modeling Instruction is designed to engage students in all aspects of modeling, broadly conceived as constructing, testing, analyzing and applying scientific models. To assess the effectiveness of Modeling Instruction, Hestenes and his students developed the Force Concept Inventory, a concept inventory tool for evaluating student understanding of introductory physics.

From 1964 to 1966, Hestenes was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton with John Archibald Wheeler. In 1966 he joined the physics department at Arizona State University, rising to full professor in 1976 and retiring in 2000 to Emeritus Professor of Physics.

David Orlin Hestenes (born May 21, 1933) is a theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.

David Orlin Hestenes (eldest son of mathematician Magnus Hestenes) was born 1933 in Chicago, Illinois. Beginning college as a pre-medical major at UCLA from 1950 to 1952, he graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 1954 with degrees in philosophy and speech. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, he entered UCLA as an unclassified graduate student, completed a physics M.A. in 1958 and won a University Fellowship. His mentor at UCLA was the physicist Robert Finkelstein, who was working on unified field theories at that time. A serendipitous encounter with lecture notes by mathematician Marcel Riesz inspired Hestenes to study a geometric interpretation of Dirac matrices. He obtained his Ph.D. from UCLA with a thesis entitled Geometric Calculus and Elementary Particles. Shortly thereafter he recognized that the Dirac algebras and Pauli matrices could be unified in matrix-free form by a device later called a spacetime split. Then he revised his thesis and published it in 1966 as a book, Space–Time Algebra, now referred to as spacetime algebra (STA). This was the first major step in developing a unified, coordinate-free geometric algebra and calculus for all of physics.