During his childhood, he lived in Argentina, Germany, and Turkey, where his father worked as high school teacher.
Best received a high school diploma from the German School of Istanbul in 1969, a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe in 1974, and a PhD from Newcastle University in 1981 for a dissertation on semantics, verification, and design of concurrent programs, supervised by Peter Lauer and Brian Randell.
[1] Best was research assistant in Carl Adam Petri's research group at the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung near Bonn (1981–1988), and professor in the Computer Science departments at the University of Hildesheim (1989–1996) and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (1996–2018), where he headed the Group for Parallel Systems.
[3] During the last years of his career in Oldenburg he worked on the automatic synthesis of Petri nets from transition systems.
In the 1990s, Best was one of the founders of CONCUR, the International Conference on Concurrency Theory, together with Jos Baeten, Kim Larsen, Ugo Montanari, and Pierre Wolper.