 Otto Neurath was born on 10 December 1882 in Vienna. He was the son of Gertrud Kaempffert and Wilhelm Neurath, a Hungarian Jewish political economist and social reformer, and was born Roman Catholic. Initially studying in Vienna philosophy, mathematics and physics and then history, philosophy and economics (he formally enrolled for classes at the University of Vienna only for two semesters in 1902-3), he followed the social scientist Ferdinand Tönnies’s advice to move to Berlin, where he received a doctoral degree in history of economics in 1906. He studied under Eduard Meyer and Gustav Schmoller and he was awarded the degree for two studies of economic history of antiquity, one on Cicero’s De Officiis and the other with an emphasis on the non-monetary economy of Egypt. In his biographical précis at the end his doctoral dissertation on Cicero, he mentioned having studied mathematics, natural science and philosophy in Vienna with von Escherich, Haberda, Haffner, Hartl, Jodl, Kohn, Kretschmer, von Lang, Lieben, Mertens, Müch, Müllner, Oberhummer, Penck, Schindler and von Schroeder, and that in Berlin, he studied national economy, history and philosophy with von Bortkiewicz, Breysig, Brunner, Eberstadt, Hintze, Jastrow, Landau, Menzer, Meyer, Paulsen, Schmoller, Simmel, and Wagner. He also acknowledged that he had studied the ideas of the logician Gregor Itelson, Wilhelm Neurath’s colleague and mathematician Oskar Simony, and the social scientist Ferdinand Tönnies.