David Feldman Fund

David Nathaniel Feldman, 57, died in Boston in October, 2023 after living with gusto for three years while undergoing treatment for glioblastoma. He enjoyed his final weeks at Dana Farber-Brigham surrounded by family and friends who came from across the country to reminisce, laugh, read and write poetry, paint, sing and celebrate his remarkable life.

David grew up in Belmont and graduated from Concord Academy.  He earned a BS in Computer Science from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2023, he served as Distinguished Visiting Technologist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, and received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art and Design for developing the technology for the monumental sculptures of Studio Janet Echelman.

At Apple Computer, David served as principal engineer on System 7 and invented the concept of an alias to a file or folder. He often laughed that perhaps his most well known computer science legacy would be his recording of the “quack” beep sound,  the first human voice on all Macintosh computers. He co-founded several successful startups, and founded Feldman Advisors, a technology  investment, strategy and development consulting firm.

David met artist Janet Echelman on a blind date in 1997. Their fourth date was in India. They married in Tampa, lived at Adams House at Harvard and then Manhattan before settling in Brookline to raise their children. He later achieved his retirement goal of becoming an “art husband,” leading the development of soft-body computer modeling for his wife’s engineering-intensive net sculptures. They traveled the world to install pieces in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, San Francisco International Airport, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Arizona, Oregon, Texas, and across the globe in Portugal, Australia, India, Italy, Netherlands, UK, Spain, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and China.

David was an unabashedly curious polymath whose counsel was valued. He enjoyed artisanal baking and installed a wood-fired brick oven at home and delighted in creating and serving pizzas for many joyous gatherings. In college, David performed the Strauss French Horn Concerti, and played in both the Dartmouth Brass Quintet and the Marching Band. A lifelong athlete, David was an avid and daring skier, tackling steep couloirs and backcountry runs; toured parts of Europe by bike and played tennis competitively.   As a cancer patient, he played the National Father-Son tournament the night before surgery (Boston Globe), and last year received the #1 New England singles player medal for his level.  David also distinguished himself as a tennis parent and entrepreneur. He helped purchase and transform a failing tennis club critical to junior tennis into the now thriving Longfellow New Hampshire Tennis Club. It recently won the best large facility in the nation from the USPTA and established the annual David Feldman Tennis Parent Award to recognize parents who exemplify unconditional acceptance, sportsmanship, joy of the sport, and community building.

His greatest love was spending time with Janet and their children, Sam, a junior at Brown University, and Lilly, a first-year student at the University of Chicago. David is also survived by his parents, Cecily (Sachs) and Wallace Feldman of FL, his sister Jennifer and brother-in-law Judge Daniel Klau of CT, brother-in-law Todd Echelman of FL, and a beloved uncle, cousins, nieces and nephews.

 

Poem for David

by Doctors Carolina Jaramillo and Daniel Echelman

 

I heard a question posed the other day

What would happen if light could travel faster than the speed of light?

I’m not sure exactly

Maybe it would be loud

Maybe it would be bright

Maybe both at the same time

Maybe everything would happen all at once

No “first, then”

All here, all now

One fewer dimension to travel across

The leaves would be green, yellow, orange and red

Every color at once

We’d get there at the same time we left

And be back on time to leave again

All of it, stacked

 

I have preferred living

With moments stringed

Each instant its own

The afternoon on the porch

Celebrating 4pm with brilliant, cold, green soup

zucchini, cucumber, dill, lemon juice

Then evening in the neighborhood

Six of us strolling

single file down narrow sidewalks

Rising and falling over roots of sage maples

A peek into the bakery

To uncover the magic of

fougasse

Magic that fit under one arm and later glistened at the kitchen table

The air warm with our chatter

 

How lucky for us that light is only as fast as the speed of light

So each moment can have full stage

Each one its own delight

 

In lieu of flowers, please support the David Feldman Memorial Fund- Asian University for Women,

an institution he loved and aided,  https://asian-university.org/donate/