His thesis advisor was Paul Libois [fr], and Tits graduated with his doctorate in 1950 with the dissertation Généralisation des groupes projectifs basés sur la notion de transitivité.

[1] Tits held professorships at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) (1962–1964), the University of Bonn (1964–1974) and the Collège de France in Paris, until becoming emeritus in 2000.

[1] Tits was an "honorary" member of the Nicolas Bourbaki group; as such, he helped popularize H.S.M.

In 2008 he was awarded the Abel Prize, along with John Griggs Thompson, "for their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory".

In the rank-2 case spherical building are generalized n-gons, and in joint work with Richard Weiss he classified these when they admit a suitable group of symmetries (the so-called Moufang polygons).