 Konrad was primarily educated in Berlin, with a brief sojourn at the University of Lausanne in 1901 for a single semester, before settling at the University of Berlin, where he remained for his doctoral studies.His doctoral thesis, entitled "Grenzwerte von Reihen bei der Annäherung an die Konvergenzgrenze", was supervised by Schottky and Frobenius; he received his PhD in 1907.Knopp traveled widely in Asia, taking teaching jobs in Nagasaki, Japan (1908-9), at the commercial college, and in Qingdao, China (1910–11), at the German-Chinese college there, and spending some time in India and China following his stay in Japan.