After his secondary education, Wittgenstein had to make a decision of what he was going to do. His father wanted him to go into the family business. However Wittgenstein was not at all interested. He was not at all happy with the idea of him going into the family business. However, the new science of aeronautics did interest him and he decided that this would be a subject worth studying. With his father's encouragement and agreement, Wittgenstein decided to go to England and to Manchester University which had a leading department in the new field of aeronautics.

It was at this time that his interest in pure mathematics developed and its connection to the new philosophies of logic being developed in England at this time. One of the centres of this new logical philosophy was Cambridge. One of the leading proponents and developers based at Cambridge was Bertram Russell who had just finished an enormous written work in this field called Principia Mathematica. This work had taken over ten years and had expended from a couple of volumes to over thirteen volumes .He was seen as one of the leading experts in the new field of logical mathematical philosophy.