Antonín Otáhal was born in Ostrava, Czech Republic, in 1955. He obtained the RNDr. degree (corresponding to M.Sc.) in Probability and Statistics from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, in 1979, and the CSc. degree (corresponding to Ph.D.) in Theoretical Cybernetics from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1984. He worked full-tme at the Institute of Information Theory and Automation from 1979 until 1993, when he started his own company and pursued business activities (in the field of language teaching and translations - he translated between 15 and 20 books of fiction from English to Czech). In that time he worked part-time at the Institute of Information Theory and Automation, mainly as a member of the Local Organising Committee of the Prague Conferences on Information Theory, Statistical Decision Functions and Random Processes. Since 2007 he has been with the Institute of Information Theory and Automation full-time again, this time as the deputy director for management and operations.

Since 2007 he has been a member of the Council for the Economy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.