Ernst von Glasersfeld was born in Munich in 1917 as an Austrian citizen. During his childhood in South Tyrol, he came into contact with many languages – this fascination for languages and language acquisition would accompany him throughout his life. He studied mathematics for a short while in Zurich and Vienna, but left the increasingly anti-Semitic Austria in 1937 for Australia, where he worked as a ski instructor before emigrating to Ireland, where he – currently stateless – worked on a farm.
After the war, he returned to South Tyrol, worked as a journalist for the time being, and began working for Silvio Ceccato at the Center for Cybernetics at the University of Milan in 1959. He then worked on a project on machine translation financed by the US Air Force, first in Italy and then at the University of Georgia in the US. It was only after the end of the project that Glasersfeld's academic career in the true sense of the word began: As Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Georgia, he worked primarily on primate languages (developing the language Yerkish) and began to formulate his theory of Radical Constructivism. He retired from this position in 1987 and continued his work at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Ernst von Glasersfeld remained in constant contact with Europe and the German-speaking world, where he received numerous awards and honorary doctorates (including one at the University of Innsbruck in 2008). He died in 2010 in Leverett (Massachusetts, US).