He completed his undergraduate study at Wheaton College and received his PhD from Ohio State University in 1934 under Tibor Radó.
From 1964, he was a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he developed the mathematics faculty and was chair of the academic senate of the university.
[1] He is famous for the Ringel–Youngs theorem (i.e. Ringel and Youngs's 1968 proof of the Heawood conjecture),[2] which is closely related to the analogue of the four-color theorem for surfaces of higher genus.
John Youngs was a consultant for Sandia National Laboratories, the Rand Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analyses as well as a trustee for Carver Research Foundation Institute in Tuskegee.
At the University of Santa Cruz, a mathematics prize for undergraduates in named after him.