With a Parker fellowship, he went to Europe and obtained his PhD from Göttingen University in Germany under the supervision of David Hilbert in 1901.

He humorously called his appointment The Accident, and told jokingly after this event, "I no longer have any intellectual interests —I just sit and talk to people."

Earle Raymond Hedrick worked on partial differential equations and on the theory of non-analytic functions of complex variables.

Earle Raymond Hedrick translated in English the Cours d'Analyse of Édouard Goursat providing American students with an up-to-date (for the beginning of the twentieth century) textbook of analysis.

He also translated the first part of the textbook of Felix Klein Elementarmathematik vom höheren Standpunkte aus in English.