Gasarch received his doctorate in computer science from Harvard in 1985, advised by Harry R. Lewis.

[5] Gasarch co-founded (with Richard Beigel) the field of Bounded Queries in Recursion Theory[6] and has written many papers in the area capped off by a book on the topic co-authored with Georgia Martin, titled Bounded Queries in Recursion Theory.

[9] He also co-founded the subfield of recursion-theoretic inductive inference named Learning via Queries[10] with Carl Smith.

[14][15][16] In 2020 he wrote Mathematical Muffin Morsels: Nobody Wants a Small Piece with Erik Metz, Jacob Prinz, and Daniel Smolyak.

[17] Lance Fortnow began writing a blog on theoretical computer science with an emphasis on complexity theory in 2002.