During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army, where he became interested in mathematics.

He then earned both a master's degree (1949) and a Ph.D. (1950) in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

His doctoral dissertation was titled "On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation".

[3] He joined the faculty at Purdue University and in 1956, moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

This is a reference to the work he had done on Internal Translator in 1956 (described by Donald Knuth as the first successful compiler), and as a member of the team that developed the programming language ALGOL.