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Biography

Rapoport was born in Lozоvaya, Russia. In 1922, he came to the United States, and in 1928 he became a naturalized citizen. He started studying music in Chicago and continued with piano, conducting and composition at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik where he studied from 1929 to 1934. However, due to the rise of Nazism, he found it impossible to make a career as a pianist.[1]

He shifted his career into mathematics, getting a Ph.D. degree in mathematics under Nicholas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago in 1941. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, he was a member of the American Communist Party for three years, but quit before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941, serving in Alaska and India during World War II.[2]

After the war, he joined the Committee on Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago (1947-1954), where he published his first book, Science and the Goals of Man. He also received a one-year- fellowship at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, California).

From 1955 to 1970 Rapoport was Professor of Mathematical Biology and Senior Research Mathematician at the University of Michigan, as well as founding member, in 1955, of the Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) at the University of Michigan. In 1970 Rapoport moved to Toronto to avoid the war-making ways of the Vietnam-era United States. He was appointed professor of mathematics and psychology at the University of Toronto, 1970-1979. He lived in bucolic Wychwood Park overlooking downtown Toronto, a neighbour of Marshall McLuhan. On his retirement from the University of Toronto, he became director of the Institute of Advanced Studies (Vienna) until 1983.

In 1954, Anatol Rapoport cofounded the Society for General Systems Research, along with the researchers Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Ralph Gerard, and Kenneth Boulding. He was awarded president of the Society for General Systems Research in 1965.

Anatol Rapoport died of pneumonia in Toronto. He is survived by his wife Gwen, daughter Anya, and sons Alexander and Anthony.

Work

Rapoport contributed to general systems theory, mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion. He combined his mathematical expertise with psychological insights into the study of game theory, social networks and semantics.

Rapoport extended these understandings into studies of psychological conflict, dealing with nuclear disarmament and international politics. His autobiography, Certainties and Doubts: A Philosophy of Life, was published in 2001.