He received his Master of Arts and then a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1947, under the supervision of Oscar Zariski, with a thesis "Ultrafilters and Compactification of Uniform Spaces".
His lectures on unique factorization domains published by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research played a significant role in computing the Picard group of a Zariski surface via the work of Jeffrey Lang and collaborators.
The method was inspired by earlier work of Nathan Jacobson and Pierre Cartier, another outstanding member of the Bourbaki group.
Samuel was also active in issues of social justice, including concerns about environmental degradation (where he was influenced by Grothendieck), and arms control.
In 1958 he was an invited speaker (Relations d'équivalence en géométrie algébrique) at the ICM in Edinburgh.