Reid studied the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge and obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 under the supervision of Peter Swinnerton-Dyer and Pierre Deligne.^[1]

Reid was a research fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge from 1973 to 1978. He became a lecturer at the University of Warwick in 1978 and was appointed professor there in 1992. He has written two well known books: Undergraduate Algebraic Geometry and Undergraduate Commutative Algebra.

Reid was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002. In the same year, he participated as an Invited Speaker in the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. Reid was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize in 2006 for his paper with Alessio Corti and Aleksandr Pukhlikov, "Fano 3-fold hypersurfaces", which made a big advance in the study of 3-dimensional algebraic varieties.^[3] In 2023 he was awarded the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society.^[4]

Reid speaks Japanese and Russian and has given lectures in Japanese.

His most famous book is

• Undergraduate Algebraic Geometry, Cambridge University Press 1988 (ISBN 978-0521356626) doi:10.1017/CBO9781139163699

Other books

• Undergraduate Commutative Algebra, Cambridge University Press 1995, doi:10.1017/CBO9781139172721
• with Balazs Szendroi: Geometry and Topology, Cambridge University Press 2007

His most famous translation is the two volume work by Shafarevich

• Basic Algebraic Geometry 1, Springer 1972 (ISBN 978-3642379550)
• Basic Algebraic Geometry 2, Springer 1977 (ISBN 978-3642380099)

And he has also translated Matsumura's

• Commutative Ring Theory, Cambridge University Press 1987, doi:10.1017/CBO9781139171762