Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport (1911 to 2007) was an American mathematical psychologist who contributed to general systems theory, mathematical biology, the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion. He was born in Lozova, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, into a secular Jewish family, moved to the United States in 1922 and became a naturalized citizen in 1928. He studied piano, conducting and composition in Vienna from 1929 to 1934 before turning to mathematics, and completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1941 under Otto Schilling and Abraham Adrian Albert. After wartime service in the U.S. Army Air Forces he worked at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Michigan from 1955 to 1970, and from 1970 at the University of Toronto, where he became professor of peace studies in 1984. He wrote Two-Person Game Theory (1966) and N-Person Game Theory (1970), and his program Tit-for-Tat won a computer tournament of iterated prisoner's dilemma games in the 1980s. He co-founded the Society for General Systems Research in 1954 and Science for Peace in 1984, and died in Toronto.