David Okafor

David Okafor was born in Lagos in 1955, the eldest of five, in a household where curiosity was never in short supply. As a boy he would climb to the roof on clear nights and trace the constellations his grandmother named in Igbo, learning early that the same sky belongs to everyone who bothers to look up. That wonder never left him. It carried him from a physics classroom in Lagos to a telescope in Boston, and into the lives of the thousands of students he taught along the way.

After emigrating in his early thirties, David spent nearly four decades as a physics teacher, most of them at a public high school where he was famous for hauling a battered reflector telescope onto the football field so his students could see Saturn’s rings for themselves. He believed astronomy was less about equations than about perspective — that a person who has truly considered the size of the universe becomes gentler, more patient, more forgiving. He taught the stars, but what he really taught was how to marvel.

He is survived by his wife, Ngozi, their two children, four grandchildren, and the countless former students who still send him photographs of the night sky. David asked for no monument. He said the sky was monument enough — and that on any clear evening, we would know exactly where to find him.