Richard Dedekind's father was a professor at the Collegium Carolinum in Brunswick. His mother was the daughter of a professor who also worked at the Collegium Carolinum. Richard was the youngest of four children and never married. He was to live with one of his sisters, who also remained unmarried, for most of his adult life.
He attended school in Brunswick from the age of seven and at this stage mathematics was not his main interest. The school, Martino-Catharineum, was a good one and Dedekind studied science, in particular physics and chemistry. However, physics became less than satisfactory to Dedekind with what he considered an imprecise logical structure and his attention turned towards mathematics.
The Collegium Carolinum was an educational institution between a high school and a university and he entered it in 1848 at the age of 16. There he was to receive a good understanding of basic mathematics studying differential and integral calculus, analytic geometry and the foundations of analysis. He entered the University of Göttingen in the spring of 1850 with a solid grounding in mathematics.