Dr. David Levitt is a cognitive and computer scientist, experimental and theoretical physicist, software engineer,, virtual and augmented reality innovator, entrepreneur, musician and writer.
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Early Life and Education
David Alex Levitt was born in New York City to Milroy Ingram Levitt, a teacher and actress, and Daniel Levitt, a taxi owner and union activist. His mother had graduate degrees in Math and Chemistry from Hunter College and was an actress before becoming a teacher. As Milroy Ingram, she was the first African American woman to star on Broadway who was not playing a servant or slave, in Ossie Davis’s 1951 production of the musical The Green Pastures. She taught math in Queens public schools, became Dean of JHS 189, and taught in China and Yemen after she retired.
At age 6, David discovered a book in his parents’ library titled How to Raise Your Child’s IQ and loved doing all the puzzles in it. When tested his IQ was 200. He skipped two grades and earned a scholarship to Sands Point Academy and Country Day School for Gifted Children. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and enrolled at Yale at age 16.
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At Yale, Levitt became a teaching assistant for physicist William R. Bennett Jr., co-inventor of the gas laser. Levitt helped students learn BASIC in Dr. Bennett’s popular course The Computer as a Research Tool. He minored in film and created short films with special effects. He pursued a passion for jazz, transcribing recordings for Prof. Maury Yeston and learning stride piano styles with Prof. John Mehegan.
Levitt earned his BS in Engineering and Applied Science at Yale and joined MIT as a graduate student at 20.
Levitt was awarded a Bell Laboratories Cooperative Research Fellowship and spent two summers at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He contributed to solid state physics experiments and drafted software for transcribing music from audio recordings.
Algorithmic Music Generation
At MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, founder of the field Professor Marvin Minsky was a keyboard player who informally fostered a community of fellow improvisors. Minsky improvised Bach style fugues; programmer Bernie Greenberg improvised classical chorales; and Levitt improvised jazz in various styles reminiscent of Fats Waller, Fatha Hines, Monk and Tatum.
For his AI masters and doctoral work with Minsky, Levitt pioneered algorithmic music generation for traditional classical and jazz styles. He and Stephan Schwanauer co-edited the MIT Press book Machine Models of Music, including parts of Levitt’s thesis A Representation of Musical Dialects.
Prof. Levitt has taught computing, AI and media at MIT and NYU. On the founding team of the MIT Media Lab, Levitt led MIT’s first Mac lab, focused on real-time media, graphical programming kits and music.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
On the team that invented virtual reality at VPL Research, Levitt created the first VR worlds with realistic gravity, object collisions and 3D sound.
Levitt wrote Pantomime’s Reality Construction Kit app software, which uses the LiDAR depth sensors in iPhone Pro and iPad Pro to create interactive augmented reality, with uncannily realistic physics that reflects the user’s unique environment.
Civil Rights Activism
Levitt’s parents were civil rights activists since the early 1950’s, when their interracial marriage was illegal in most US states. Levitt and his family were active in the ACLU and other rights organizations, and he was an early contributor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded by his Silicon Valley friends.
On a trip to China with his mother in 1979, exiled civil rights leader and Radio Free Dixie founder Robert F. Williams introduced himself and thanked Milroy Levitt for rescuing his family in the 1960s after he fled racist mobs to Cuba and then China. His parents had pretended Williams’ children were David and his sister as they crossed into Ottawa for safety.
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Privacy Policy at Apple

Dr. Levitt was among the first enthusiastic Macintosh computer software developers and has been an Apple shareholder since the 1980s. In 2013 after Edward Snowden revealed widespread illegal, warrantless surveillance of digital media by the US and its allies, Levitt and his community investigated and sought to ensure companies like Apple were not complicit in or beneficiaries of these crimes, some of which exploited flaws in widely distributed software or cooperation of executives and staff.
Levitt joined several individuals and organizations, including Zaki Manian of the Restore the Fourth Amendment privacy group and attorney Alice Townes, to obtain cooperation on this specifically from Apple, recruiting founder Steve Wozniak and others to the effort. Unlike most large Silicon Valley and internet service companies, Apple is a hardware and system software firm whose core business model doesn’t include collecting personal information.


At Apple’s February 24, 2014 shareholder meeting, shareholder Levitt presented a proposal to Apple’s directors recommending that Apple explicitly serve its customers, reputation and business interests by becoming a leader in digital privacy — enforcing a Spy Lockout, notifying users of shared information, and requiring users’ explicit permission to share any collected data. After a round of applause, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “The board isn’t going to vote to compel me to do what you’ve said today. But I’m going to do it.” Apple’s policies continue to reflect this commitment.
Senate Candidacy
A full spectrum scientist, Dr. Levitt has been an eager student of political science — the process of building models that enable reasonable predictions of political events as with other sciences — rather than unaccountable punditry. Informed by thinkers like MIT’s Noam Chomsky and principled leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders, Levitt sought to understand the process where nominally democratic candidates served narrow interests and lobbyists, rather than their constituents — and seeking ways to leverage modern digital media and the internet for better outcomes. Levitt co-founded several activist groups including BeYourGovernment, and was interviewed in 2011 at Occupy Wall Street in NYC by Cenk Uygur on CurrentTV discussing a new breed of progressive grass roots candidates, some of whom now serve in Congress. California voters were frustrated that Senator Dianne Feinstein — who always voted for unpopular, costly, illegal wars, refused all debate, and advocated “centrist” policies that met oligarchs and racists halfway — was apparently unchallenged within her party.
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In 2012 Dr. Levitt was nominated by voters for candidacy in the US Senate election, opposing Dianne Feinstein and others in the primary — directly conducting political science experiments in vivo in the election. Levitt developed a popular platform, met and debated highly qualified and utterly unqualified opponents, produced and distributed video and campaign material online, and earned over 70,000 votes in the primary.
During and after the campaign Levitt learned just how Senator Feinstein won every race without debating any other candidate, while investing millions in family funds from military contracts in each campaign, until her death in 2023 — months after her staff reported she was unable to serve due to dementia. A key factor was a party rule that was at first kept private, then made public — and then found to be illegal under anti-trust law and officially discontinued — that blacklisted any consultant who worked on a campaign other than the incumbent’s.
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Physics and Gravity Research
Levitt has been passionate about finding clearer ways to think about Einstein’s theories of relativity and gravity. He works with The Wolfram Institute using Mathematica and other tools to help visualize Einstein’s idea that gravity is a fictitious force and earth’s surface accelerates outward, as easily confirmed by accelerometers. Levitt has written multiple articles, collaborated on software, and presented as an Invited speaker at international physics conferences ACP 2023 and ISGAC 2024, and online. He is Keynote Speaker and Co-Chair at the 3rd International Summit on Gravitation, Astrophysics and Cosmology, ISGAC 2025.
