He is currently the Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Born in Dillon, South Carolina and educated in local schools, Manning eventually moved to North Haven, Connecticut, soon afterwards.

[1] His dissertation, The Emergence of the Weierstrassian Approach To Complex Analysis, was supervised by I. Bernard Cohen.

[2] While he was doing his graduate studies, Manning helped guide fellow Dillon native Ben Bernanke, who would eventually become the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, to apply to Harvard.

He helped assuage the Bernanke family, who were concerned that Ben would "lose his Jewish identity" if he went to Harvard, that "there were Jews in Boston.