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Gell-Mann was born in lower Manhattan into a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gell-Mann quickly revealed himself as a child prodigy.

Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and love for nature and mathematics, he graduated valedictorian from the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School and subsequently entered Yale at the age of 15 as a member of Jonathan Edwards College.

At Yale, he participated in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and was on the team representing Yale University ( along with Murray Gerstenhaber and Henry O. Pollak ) that won the second prize in 1947.

In 1948, Gell-Mann earned a bachelor's degree in Physics and went on to attend graduate school at MIT where he received his PhD in physics in 1951.