After high school he studied from 1966 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he earned his diploma in physics in 1970.

He received his doctorate in 1972 at the University of Bonn,[2] his dissertation was titled Analytical solution of the statistical bootstrap model, where he was then to 1975 as a post-doctoral student.

[1] His predicted eleven-dimensional supergravity theory was constructed shortly after by Eugène Cremmer, Bernard Julia and Joël Scherk.

Nahm also conducted research about the Mayan civilisation and their astronomy, for example, the role of Venus (and their phases) in terms of calendar prediction that was important for their planning of wars.

In his Mayan research, he also worked with Linda Schele and Nikolai Grube and participated in the ongoing decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs.