Barna Aladár Szabó was born on September 21, 1935 in Martonvásár, Hungary the son of József and Gizella (Iványi) Szabó. After graduating from the Franciscan High School in Esztergom in 1954, he was admitted to the Faculty of Mining Engineering of the Technical University of Heavy Industry in Miskolc (now University of Miskolc). Following the failed Hungarian uprising in 1956 he emigrated to Canada, where he resumed his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, receiving his Bachelor of Science in 1960. In 1963 he began part-time studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he received his Master of Science degree in Civil Engineering in 1966 and later his Doctorate of Philosophy in 1968. His ideas on using high order polynomials in the Finite Element Method for controlling errors of discretization were outlined in his dissertation.