Dr. David James Rogers was a botanist and taxonomist, who graduated from Washington University in 1951 with a degree in Systematic Biology, focusing on economic botany and edible plants. Beginning in the 1950s he became interested in computer science and went on to develop programs for botanical taxonomy, primarily the TAXIR (taxonomic information retrieval) Accessioner. This work was largely done at the University of Colorado, where he was director of the Taximetrics Laboratory and a professor of botany. Much of his botanical research is intertwined with his interest in mathematics and computation, such as his collection and study of Manihot in Latin America which he classified in part using TAXIR. Beyond this, he was primarily interested in researching the economics and sociology of edible and otherwise cultivated plants, performing studies in tropical countries such as Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and Costa Rica.