Fox grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut and attended Hall High School.

The project was titled "Rainbow Ramsey Theory: Rainbow Arithmetic Progressions and Anti-Ramsey Results"[3] and was based on a research project he did at a six-week summer camp in mathematics, the Research Science Institute (RSI), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

[4] He also participated in an earlier high school mathematics program at Ohio State University.

[5] Fox completed his PhD in 2010 from Princeton University; his dissertation, supervised by Benny Sudakov, was titled Ramsey Numbers.

[6] Fox worked in the mathematics department at MIT from 2010 to 2014, where he continued to teach classes relating to combinatorics.