Goldschmidt was born in Zürich, Switzerland on 27 January 1888. His father, Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, (1857&ndash;1937) was a physical chemist at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum and his mother, Amelie Koehne (1864&ndash;1929), was the daughter of a lumber merchant. They named him Viktor after a colleague of Heinrich, Victor Meyer. His fathers family was Jewish back to at least 1600 and mostly highly educated, with rabbis, judges, lawyers and military officers among their numbers. As his fathers career progressed, the family moved first to Amsterdam in 1893, to Heidelberg in 1896, and finally to Kristiania (later Oslo), Norway in 1901, where he took over the physical chemistry chair at the university. The family became Norwegian citizens in 1905.
Goldschmidt entered the University of Kristiana (later the University of Oslo) in 1906 and studied inorganic and physical chemistry, geology, mineralogy, physics, mathematics, zoology and botany. He secured a fellowship for his doctoral studies from the university at the age of 21 (1909). He worked on his thesis with the noted geologist Waldemar Christofer Brøgger and obtained his Norwegian doctor’s degree when he was 23 years old (1911). For his dissertation titled Die Kontaktmetamorphose im Kristianiagebiet ("The Contact Metamorphism in the Kristiania Region"), the Norwegian Academy of Sciences awarded him the Fridtjof Nansen award in 1912. The same year he was made Docent (Associate Professor) of Mineralogy and Petrography at the university.