Anatol Rapoport (born May 22, 1911) is a Russian-born American Jewish, mathematical psychologist. He is one of the founders of the General systems theory. He also contributed to Mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of Social interaction and Stochastic models of contagion. He combined his mathematical expertise with psychological insights to the study of Game theory and semantics. Rapoport extended these understandings into studies of psychological conflict, dealing with nuclear disarmament and international politics.

Rappoport initially trained as a musician to become a virtuoso pianist performing masterpieces by classical composers. He studied Piano, conducting and composition, at the Staatsakademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst, in Vienna between the years (1929-1934). However due to the rise of Nazism he found it almost impossible to make a career as a Pianist. He shifted career into mathematics, getting a Ph.D. degree in mathematics, under Nicholas Rashevsky, at the University of Chicago in (1941). After which he served in the U.S. Air Force in Alaska and India, during World War II. He returned to the United States and joined the Comittee on Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago (1947-1954), which was followed by his appointment at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, California). There he pioneered in the modeling of parasitism and symbiosis, researching Cybernetic theory. This went on to give a conceptual basis for his lifelong work in conflict-and-cooperation.

In (1954), Anatol Rapoport founded the Society for General Systems Research, along with the researchers Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Ralph Gerard, and Kenneth Boulding. Since (1970) He has been the Professor emeritus of Psychology and Mathematics in the University of Toronto, Canada. He is also the Professor for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Selected works

• Rapoport, A. (1953). Spread of information through a population with sociostructural bias: I. Assumption of transitivity. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 15, 523-533.

• Rapoport, A., Horvath, W.J., (1960) The theoretical channel capacity of a single neuron as determined by various coding systems. Information and Control, 3(4):335-350.

• Rapoport, A. (1963). Mathematical models of social interaction. In R. D. Luce, R. R. Bush, & E. Galanter (Eds.), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology (Vol. II, pp. 493-579). New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons.

• Gerard, R.W., Kluckhohn, C., Rapaport, A. (1956). Biological and cultural evolution: Some analogies and explorations. Behavioral Science 1: 6-34.

• Slobodkin L, Rapoport A. (1974). An optimal strategy of evolution. Q. Rev. Biol. 49:181-200