His extensive list of co-authors includes Albert Einstein, Paul Erdős, Richard Bellman, Béla Bollobás, Sarvadaman Chowla, Ronald Graham, Lee Albert Rubel, Mathukumalli V Subbarao, László Lovász, Carl Pomerance, Moshe Goldberg, and George Szekeres.
Following the death of his father, the family fled the Nazi regime for Palestine in 1933, and Straus was educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Although he never received an undergraduate degree, Straus began graduate studies at Columbia University in New York, earning a PhD in 1948 under F. J. Murray.
After a three-year stint at the Institute for Advanced Study, Straus took a position at the University of California, Los Angeles, which he kept for the rest of his life.
One of his best known contributions in popular mathematics is the Erdős–Straus conjecture that every number of the form 4/n has a three-term Egyptian fraction.