Dirk J. Struik was born in Rotterdam in 1894, where he attended the Hogere Burger School from 1906–1911 before entering Leiden University. At Leiden he studied algebra and analysis with J. C. Kluyver, geometry with P. Zeeman, and physics under Paul Ehrenfest. After a brief stint as a high school teacher at Alkmaar, he spent seven years at Delft as the assistant to J. A. Schouten, one of the founders of tensor analysis. Their collaboration led to Struik's dissertation, class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Grundziige der mehrdimensionalen Differentialgeometrie in direkter Darstellung, published by Springer in 1922, and numerous other works in the years to follow.