In 1974 he found a counterexample to the Seifert conjecture that every non-vanishing vector field on the 3-sphere has a closed integral curve.
[2] In 1995 he demonstrated that Sergei Novikov's compact leaf theorem cannot be generalized to manifolds with dimension greater than 3.
[4] After high school, he attended the College of the Holy Cross, graduating with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.)
His dissertation was titled Secondary cohomology operations induced by the diagonal mapping.
from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was ordained in 1970 as a Catholic priest.