[1] He received his bachelor's degree in 1950 from the University of Rochester and his PhD in 1954 from Yale University under Nathan Jacobson with thesis Lie algebras of prime characteristic.
[2] After he received his PhD he was a Henry Burchard Fine Instructor at Princeton University from 1954–1956.
In 1956 he became an instructor and from 1965 a full professor at Yale, where he was chair of the mathematics department from 1974 to 1977.
For the academic year 1958/59 he was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Münster.
His doctoral students include James E. Humphreys, Brian J Parshall, and Daniel K. Nakano.