[3] He graduated from George School in Pennsylvania in early 1944, and studied at Columbia College from 1944 to 1948, while on leave from the Coast Guard.

Mills demonstrated his mathematical ability by becoming a Putnam Fellow in 1948,[4] and by receiving first-class honors in the Tripos.

[8][9][10] The mathematical ability Mills displayed early on was mastered in his eventual career as a full-time theoretical physicist.

After a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Mills became professor of physics at Ohio State University in 1956.

[1] Mills and Yang shared the 1980 Rumford Premium Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for their "development of a generalized gauge invariant field theory" in 1954.