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Educated at home until the age of fourteen, Wittgenstein enrolled at the Realschule in Linz the same year Adolph Hitler graduated. For two years he studied mainly mathematics and physics before going on to Berlin to get a degree in engineering. At nineteen he moved to England with the idea of further studying aeronautical engineering (the forerunner of aerospace engineering) at the University of Manchester. His growing interest in the foundations of mathematics, however, took him instead to Cambridge University where he met [and studied with] Bertrand Russell.
When World War I broke out Wittgenstein interrupted his studies with Russell to go and fight on the side of the Germans. He left Cambridge and became an officer in the Austrian army. While in the trenches he began writing what would be his doctoral dissertation and one of the most influential philosophy books of the twentieth century. he completed it in an Italian prison camp. The work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German ed. 1921, English ed. 1922) ... was the only work published in his lifetime but it helped create a revolution in philosophy, leading to the development of logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and semantics.
