Eike Best was born in Neustadt an der Weinstraße. During his childhood, he lived in Argentina, Germany, and Turkey, where his father worked as high school teacher. Best received a high school diploma from the German School of Istanbul in 1969, a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe in 1974, and a PhD from Newcastle University in 1981 for a dissertation on semantics, verification, and design of concurrent programs, supervised by Peter Lauer and Brian Randell. He habilitated in 1988 at the University of Bonn with a thesis on causal semantics of non-sequential programs.
