He was accepted to St Andrew's College, a private school, as his father had served under a former headmaster.

Their regulations did not permit him to graduate until 1954 and so it was not until September 1955 that he moved to the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD in 1959.

Kerr speculated that the "main reason why the US Air Force had created a General Relativity section was probably to show the U.S. Navy that they could also do pure research.

"[10] In 1962, Kerr joined Alfred Schild and his Relativity Group at the University of Texas at Austin.

[12] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel laureate, 1983) is quoted as having said : In 1965, with Alfred Schild, he introduced the concept of Kerr–Schild perturbations and developed the Kerr–Newman metric.

Fulvio Melia interviewed Kerr about his work on the solution for the book Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics published in 2009.