Son of a Russian engineer Jewish religion, Leo Wiener, who emigrated in 1880 to New Orleans, United States. He was born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1894. After several school failures, his father, a circumstance which, together with the rich family library, was decisive in his career was directly responsible for their formation. Progress was exceptional and eleven joined the Tufts College, where he graduated in mathematics three years later, before moving to Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in philosophy at the astonishing age of 18, with a thesis on mathematical logic directed by Karl Schmidt. He traveled to England, Cambridge University, where he deepened his studies with Bertrand Russell and GH Hardy, and later in Göttingen to study differential equations with Hilbert and Landau. He returned to the United States on the eve of the First World War and taught philosophy at Harvard. During the war he was invited to work on ballistic calculations by the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and ended the conflict, he joined the MIT professor of mathematics.