He became an officer in the United States Army Air Forces, commanding a B-17 Flying Fortress in World War II.
He wrote or co-wrote a series of nine mathematics textbooks for kindergarten through high school which use an incremental teaching method often called "Saxon math".
According to Saxon in media interviews from the 1980s and early 1990s and documentation coming with the high-school level textbooks, the inclusion of specialised and/or somewhat uncommon words such as "sciolist" in the story problems is intended as a vocabulary builder in preparation for the verbal section of the SAT and similar tests.
Buckley announced Saxon's success on the front page of the National Review magazine in 1981 with the headline "Supply-side Algebra."
Later, he co-authored his Calculus with Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry textbook with Frank Wang, then a graduate student in mathematics at MIT.
[8] Upon graduation from MIT with a PhD in pure mathematics, Frank Wang was asked by Saxon to run the day-to-day operations of the company.
The company that he founded was owned by his four children and celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2001 at a gala at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
The group Citizens for the Constructive Review of Public Policy specifically mentions Saxon math and textbooks in their original 1990 statement of principles.
As a board member, Dr. Saxon wished to honor both his father's academy experience and military career, as well as serve the research facility.
The program allows the students an opportunity for knowledge acquisition and to prepare those who go on to serve as medical officers or in similar scientific pursuits.