[4] From 1906 to 1911, Dirk attended the Hogere Burgers School in Rotterdam, where he was introduced to left-wing politics and socialism by a favorite math teacher, G. W. Ten Dam.

During this period, Struik developed his doctoral dissertation, "The Application of Tensor Methods to Riemannian Manifolds.

That same year he married Saly Ruth Ramler,[8] a Czech mathematician with a doctorate from the Charles University of Prague.

In 1924, funded by a Rockefeller fellowship, Struik traveled to Rome to collaborate with the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita.

In 1925, thanks to an extension of his fellowship, he worked with Richard Courant at the University of Göttingen, where Struik got the opportunity to edit Felix Klein's unpublished lectures on 19th century mathematics.

[6] He also rekindled interest in a mistaken claim Aristotle had made that space could be tiled with regular congruent tetrahedra.

[9] In 1926, Struik was offered positions as a lecturer in mathematics at Moscow State University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

When asked in 1994, upon the occasion of his 100th birthday, how he managed to still author peer-reviewed journal articles at such an advanced age, Struik replied blithely that he had the "3Ms" a man needs to sustain himself: Marriage (although he was recently a widower at that time), Mathematics, and Marxism.

During the early 1950s McCarthy era, Struik's Marxist opinions led to accusations of him being a spy for the Soviet Union.

[14] The indictment against Struik was quashed in 1956 by Judge Paul G. Kirk after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in a different case that the federal Smith Act superseded state sedition laws.

In addition to supplying the full text of the document, with his annotations, Struik included as Appendices all Prefaces by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for the various language editions of the Manifesto, plus two early Manifesto drafts by Engels, one of which had just been found at the time Struik's book was published.