[1] He attended Ithaca High School, then Harvard University as an undergraduate, becoming a Putnam Fellow in 1964.

[3] His thesis, titled On representations of nilpotent groups, was written under the supervision of Calvin Moore.

Between 1969 and 1974, Howe taught at the State University of New York in Stony Brook before joining the Yale faculty in 1974.

His doctoral students include Ju-Lee Kim, Jian-Shu Li, Zeev Rudnick, Eng-Chye Tan, and Chen-Bo Zhu.

[7] In 2015 he received Texas A&M University's inaugural Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education.