In his,[5][6] Bird recounts he obtain his elementary and junior high education in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and thereafter he attending Central High school in Washington D. C. Bird attended University of Maryland from 1941 to 1943, where he was initiated into the Alpha Rho chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma in 1943.
During 1950–1951, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Instituut voor Theoretische Fysica, Universiteit van Amsterdam under Jan de Boer.
During his postdoc, he co-authored his first textbook, the 1,200-page Molecular Theory of Gases and Liquids, along with his advisor Joseph O. Hirschfelder and another UW-Madison professor Charles F. Curtiss.
Bird was a recipient of the National Medal of Science; the Medal was awarded by President Ronald Reagan "for his profoundly influential books and research on kinetic theory, transport phenomena, the behavior of polymeric fluids, and foreign language study for engineers and scientists.
[15] Bird was the coauthor of several influential books in transport phenomena and rheology, including the classic textbook Transport Phenomena, which was translated into many foreign languages, including Spanish, Italian, Czech, Russian, Persian, and Chinese and the 1200-page tome Molecular Theory of Gases and Liquids.