The known details of the personal side of Frege's life are few. Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was born November 8, 1848, in Wismar, a town in Pomerania. His father, Karl Alexander (1809–1866), a theologian of some repute, together with his mother, Auguste (d. 1878), ran a school for girls there. Our knowledge of the remainder of Frege's personal life is similarly impoverished. He married Margarete Lieseberg (1856–1904) in 1887. They had several children together, all of whom died at very early ages. Frege adopted a child, Alfred, and raised him on his own. Alfred, who became an engineer, died in 1945 in action during the Second World War. Frege himself died July 26, 1925, at age seventy-seven.

We can say somewhat more about his intellectual life. Frege left home at age twenty-one to enter the University at Jena. He studied mathematics for two years at Jena, and then for two more at Göttingen, where he earned his doctorate in mathematics in December 1873 with a dissertation, supervised by Ernst Schering, in geometry. Although mathematics was clearly his primary study, Frege took a number of courses in physics and chemistry, and, most interestingly for us, philosophy. At Jena, he attended Kuno Fischer's course on Kant's Critical Philosophy, and in his first semester at Göttingen, he attended Hermann Lotze's course on the Philosophy of Religion. The influence and importance of Kant is evident throughout Frege's work, that of Lotze's work on logic is tangible but largely circumstantial.