Ford was then called to Scotland, where in 1914 he was instructor of mathematics at University of Edinburgh.

Games of chess on campus gave Ford some social contact and reputation.

In 1915 Ford published An Introduction to the Theory of Automorphic Functions as Edinburgh Mathematical Tract # 6.

Returning to Harvard in 1917, Ford was awarded his Ph.D. for the thesis Rational Approximations to an Irrational Complex Number, under the supervision of Maxime Bôcher.

From there he went to the editorship of The American Mathematical Monthly during World War II.