[1] Ron Fagin was born and grew up in Oklahoma City, where he attended Northwest Classen High School.

Fagin received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, where he worked under the supervision of Robert Vaught.

He has served as program committee chair for ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems 1984, Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge 1994, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing 2005, and the International Conference on Database Theory 2009.

Fagin's theorem, which he proved in his PhD thesis, states that existential second-order logic coincides with the complexity class NP in the sense that a decision problem can be expressed in existential second-order logic if and only if it can be solved by a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time.

[7][8] Another result that he proved in his PhD thesis is that first-order logic has a zero-one law, which says that if S is a first-order sentence with only relational symbols (no function or constant symbols), then the fraction of n-node structures that satisfy S converges as n goes to infinity, and in fact converges to 0 or 1.