 Lefschetz recognized Adem's mathematical talent, and sent him as a doctoral student to Princeton University where he graduated in 1952.His dissertation, "Iterations of the squaring operations in algebraic topology", was written under the supervision of Norman Steenrod and introduced what are now called the Adem relations.His brother is geophysicist Julián Adem, who obtained a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1953.