Daniel Amit was born on May 5, 1938, in Łódź, Poland, to a wealthy Jewish family. In March 1940, several months after the German occupation of Poland, his parents managed to slip out of the country, and traveling through Italy, Turkey, Greece and Lebanon, reached Tel Aviv in July of the same year. Daniel grew up in a middle class neighbourhood of central Tel Aviv, met his wife to be, Dahlia, in high school and married her two years later at the age of 18. In 1961, he received a BA is Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then completed his MA in Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, after which he served for two years in the newly established computer unit of the Israeli Army.