At age 15, he enrolled in the NSF summer science training program, designed to enrich mathematical talent in America.

[1] Farris studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Pomona College and received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His dissertation Spiralling Chains in CR Manifolds was supervised by Richard Burt Melrose.

[5][6] His article "The Edge of the Universe" for Math Horizons received the Trevor Adams Award from the MAA.

[7] In 2015, his book Creating Symmetry: The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, which conveys his artistic method, was published by the Princeton University Press.

[11] His award-winning[16] artwork has been profiled by the American Mathematical Society,[17] He promotes a visual and computational perspective of math through his art, seminars, writing, etc.