Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport (Russian: Анато́лий Бори́сович Рапопо́рт; May 22, 1911 – January 20, 2007) was a Russian-born American mathematical psychologist. He contributed to general systems theory, mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and models of contagion.

Rapoport was born in Lozova, Kharkov Governorate, Russia (in today's Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine) into a secular Jewish family. 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.

He shifted his career into mathematics, getting a Ph.D. degree in mathematics under Otto Schilling and Abraham Adrian Albert at the University of Chicago in 1941 on the thesis Construction of Non-Abelian Fields with Prescribed Arithmetic. 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.