He completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1957; his dissertation, titled On torsion free abelian groups, was written under the supervision of Emil Artin.[1]
He developed a commutative cohomology theory for commutative algebras.[4] Along with his colleague Marie A. Vitulli, he developed a unified valuation theory for rings with zero divisors that generalized both Krull and Archimedean valuations.[5]
He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1963–1964.[6] He supervised 28 doctoral students including Joel Cunningham.[1] Ann Hill Harrison endowed the Harrison Memory Award for outstanding mathematical students at the University of Oregon.[3] He is survived by his son, composer and pianist Michael Harrison, a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 2018–2019,[7] and his daughter Jo Ellen Harrison.
"On the structure of Ext". In: Abelian Groups (Proc. Sympos., New Mexico State Univ., 1962). 1963. pp. 195–209.
Abelian extensions of commutative rings. American Mathematical Society. 1965.
with Stephen U. Chase and Alex F. T. W. Rosenberg: Galois theory and cohomology of commutative rings. American Mathematical Society. 1965.
Finite and infinite primes for rings and fields. Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, No. 68. 1966; 62 pp.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
with Joel Cunningham: Witt rings. Department of Mathematics, University of Kentucky. 1970.
with Bodo Pareigis: "Witt rings of higher degree forms". Communications in Algebra. 16 (6): 1275–1313. 1985.
with M. A. Vitulli: Harrison, D.K.; Vltulli, M A. (1989). "Complex-valued places and CMC subsets of a field". Communications in Algebra. 17 (10): 2529–2537. doi:10.1080/00927878908823860.