He was born in Brockway, Pennsylvania. After studying with Mark Rothko at the California School of Fine Arts, he received a Master of Fine Arts from the State University of Iowa in 1952, and a doctoral degree in mathematics from Duke University in 1962. He taught math at Ramapo College in New Jersey, and also taught for brief periods at the University of South Florida and the University of Kentucky. His work includes several large abstract paintings created by staining raw, unprimed canvas with thinned paint, allowing the colors to soak directly into the weave of the canvas. He was represented by and exhibited at the Knoedler & Co. Gallery in New York City from 1979 to 1986 and was named New Talent Graphic Artist of the year in 1963 by Art in America on the recommendation of MoMA curators Dorothy Miller and william S. Lieberman. In 1979 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and in 1982 he received a New Jersey Council on the Arts Award.
He exhibited paintings in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum "Younger American Painters" (May 12 to July 25, 1954) – alongside Sonia Gechtoff, william Baziotes, Morris Louis, Richard Diebenkorn, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and others. This was one of the first major exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism at an American art museum, and it traveled to the Portland Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. He also exhibited at MoMA in 1963 and MoMA purchased several works by Roth for its permanent collections.
from the 1960s, McCormick Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
