[3] Arbib was educated in New Zealand and at The Scots College in Sydney, Australia.
[citation needed] Arbib received his PhD in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963.
[3][4] As a student, he also worked with Warren McCulloch, the co-inventor of the artificial neural network and finite-state machine.
[3][5] Arbib spent five years at Stanford, before moving to become becoming the founding chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970.
[6] Arbib's collected papers from the period 1960 through 1985 are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.