In 1948 his father Meyer Goldhaber, an anatomist by education and a dentist by profession, died of complications from a bleeding ulcer at the age of 35.

After two years his mother married Sam Wainer, a local businessman, and the family relocated to Long Island.

In 1960, at the end of his junior year in high school, he was accepted into a National Science Foundation honors program at Columbia University.

He spent two hours traveling on subway and bus each way to and from Columbia, learning about Markov chains and number theory in the morning and working on the IBM 650 computer in the afternoon.

There, Professor George Boguslavsky was so impressed with his abilities and enthusiasm that he recommended Wainer for a Psychometric Fellowship at Princeton University under Harold Gulliksen.

[4] After Temple he taught at the University of Chicago, as a member of the Committee on Methodology in the department of Behavioral Sciences until 1977.

In 1980 he moved to Princeton NJ to become a principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, a position he held for 21 years.

In 2001 he assumed the position of Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners, from which he retired on December 2, 2016.

In 2007 he arranged for the publication of replica volumes of William Playfair's Atlas as well as his Statistical Breviary, the first books on the subject.