The roots of the von Bertalanffy family tree – '-ffy' means "son of," and 'von' signifies nobility – could be traced back four centuries to the nobility of Hungary. The Austrian branch of the family was founded by Karl-Joseph von Bertalanffy (1833-1912) who adopted the name Josef von Bertalan to pursue a career as a director of classical theater and operetta. His eldest son, Gustav von Bertalanffy (1861-1919), a prominent railway administrator, when he was thirty-four, married Charlotte Vogel, a beautiful girl of seventeen, the daughter of a wealthy Vienna publisher, who had been raised in upper class Catholic schools subsequent to the death of her mother thirteen years earlier.

Charlotte bore a son who survived only one week, then a daughter who died of complications of a throat infection at the age of two. Understandably, Charlotte became an unusually protective mother with the birth of her next and last child, born September 19, 1901, and christened Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who was educated by private tutors at home until he was ten because Charlotte was fearful that Ludwig might succumb to disease if he were to attend public school. Perhaps in part because of his private tutoring, Ludwig began school with so many academic advantages that he was able to pass his examinations with honors despite a poor class attendance record. At about the time he began school, his parents divorce and both remarried. Apparently the divorce was not traumatic for Ludwig.

When he was seventeen Austria suffered a serious economic decline, but in spite of it and the postwar inflation that caused the money to be drastically devalued, Ludwig pursuit of knowledge was undisturbed and undiminished. At the Gymnasium, he studied Homer, Plato, Virgil and Ovid in their original languages. He became familiar with the works of Lamark, Darwing, Marx and Spengler. He mastered calculus. On his own he wrote poetry, a play about Cesare Borgia, and a novel he called 'The New Tristan.' In a small home laboratory, he became adept with a microscope. Paul Kammerer, the famous 'Prater Vivarium' biologist and neighbor of the Bertalanffys, introduced him in dissection and animal and plant anatomy. Meanwhile, increasingly bored by classes he attended school only for examinations. After a period a the University of Innsbruck from 1920 to 1924, Bertalanffy enrolled at the University of Vienna, where he was equally attracted to science and philosophy.

In 1926, with physicist-philosopher Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) as his supervisor, he received his Ph. D. with a thesis about the pioneering psychophysics of physicist-philosopher Gustav Fechner (1801-1887). The title of his thesis was: "Fechner und das Problem der Integration höherer Ordnung" (Fechner and the problem of integration of higher order).