He wanted to pursue a career as a teacher, but he was persuaded to continue with his education because of his extraordinary mathematical talent.

His dissertation Mapping theorems in non-compact spaces was written under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz and was published (with additions) in 1947 in the American Journal of Mathematics.

Because of Senator Joseph McCarthy's red scare, he decided to take his family to England shortly thereafter, where he was appointed Reader in applied mathematics at Birkbeck College in 1951.

The last years of his life were marked by a long illness, yet he continued working, developing Dowker notation in the weeks before his death.

[6] Along with Morwen Thistlethwaite, he developed Dowker notation, a simple way of describing knots, suitable for computers.