Anatol Rapoport

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Anatol Rapoport
Abraham Adrian Albert

Anatol Borisovich Rapoport (

contagion
.

Biography

Rapoport was born in

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.[2]

He shifted his career into

American Communist Party for three years, but quit before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1941, serving in Alaska and India during World War II.[4]

After the war, he joined the Committee on Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago (1947–54), publishing his first book, Science and the Goals of Man, co-authored with semanticist S. I. Hayakawa in 1950. He also received a one-year fellowship at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

From 1955 to 1970, Rapoport was Professor of Mathematical Biology and Senior Research Mathematician at the

Institute of Advanced Studies (Vienna)
until 1983.

University of Toronto appointed him professor of peace studies in 1984, a position he held until 1996, but continued to teach until 2000.[6]

In 1984 he co-founded Science for Peace, was elected president and remained on its executive until 1998.[6]

In 1954 Anatol Rapoport co-founded the

Society for General Systems Research
in 1965.

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

Work

Rapoport contributed to

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. An article celebrating his legacy and thinking includes a career overview alongside testimonials by scholars and family that provide a glimpse of Anatol Rapoport, the scientist and the person.[5]

Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge called Rapoport a polymath whose work Bunge found congenial because of its applicability to real-life problems, its use of mathematics, and its "avoidance of holistic blabber".[7]

Game theory

Rapoport had a versatile mind, working in mathematics, psychology, biology, game theory, social network analysis, and peace and conflict studies. For example, 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.

Among many other well-known books on fights, games, violence, and peace, Rapoport was the author of over 300 articles and of "Two-Person Game Theory" (1966) and "N-Person Game Theory" (1970). He analyzed contests in which there are more than two sets of conflicting interests, such as war, diplomacy, poker, or bargaining. His work led him to peace research, including books on The Origins of Violence (1989) and Peace, An Idea Whose Time Has Come (1993).

In the 1980s, he won a computer tournament which was based on

Tit-for-Tat, has only four lines of code. The program opens by cooperating with its opponent. It then plays exactly as the other side played in the previous game. If the other side defected in the previous game, the program also defects; but only for one game. If the other side cooperates, the program continues to cooperate. According to Peace Magazine author/editor Metta Spencer
, the program "punished the other player for selfish behaviour and rewarded her for cooperative behaviour—but the punishment lasted only as long as the selfish behaviour lasted. This proved to be an exceptionally effective sanction, quickly showing the other side the advantages of cooperating. It also set moral philosophers to proposing this as a workable principle to use in real life interactions".

His children report that he was a strong chess player but a bad poker player because he non-verbally revealed the strength of his hands.[4]

Social network analysis

Rapoport was an early developer of

diffusion of innovation, and by extension, to epidemiology. Rapoport's empirical work traced the spread of information within a school. It prefigured the study of degrees of separation by showing the rapid spread of information in a population to almost all—but not all—school members (see references below). His work on random nets predates the random graphs as defined by the Erdős–Rényi model and independently by Edgar Gilbert
.

Rapoport is also the originator of the theory behind the interpretation of bias in social networks, which pertains to the extent to which a network deviates from a random base model.[9] He introduced what is now known as "preferential attachment mechanism" in biased networks.[10] It is a stochastic process that involves connected nodes that snowball into more connections.[10] Rapoport also published an article that outlined a probabilistic approach to animal sociology, which is one of the earliest efforts at modeling simple social structures.[11]

Conflict and peace studies

According to

Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[12]

Rapoport returned to the

Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies continued to flourish at the University of Toronto under the leadership of Thomas Homer-Dixon, and, from 2008, under Ron Levi. When Rapoport began, there was one (unpaid) professor and twelve students. In 2007, there were three paid professors and ninety students.[13]

Rapoport's students report that he was an engaged and inspiring professor who captured their attention, imagination and interest with his wide-ranging knowledge, passion for the subject, good humor, kind and generous spirit, attentiveness to student concerns, and animated teaching style.[14]

In 1981 Rapoport co-founded the international non-governmental organization Science for Peace. He was recognized in the 1980s for his contribution to world peace through nuclear conflict restraint via his game theoretic models of psychological conflict resolution. He won the Lentz International Peace Research Prize in 1976. Professor Rapoport was also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Environmental Peace published by the International Innovation Projects at the University of Toronto.

Publications

Books

  • 1950, Science and the Goals of Man, Harper & Bros., New York
  • 1953, Operational Philosophy: Integrating Knowledge and Action, Harper & Bros., New York
  • 1960, Fights, Games, and Debates, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
  • 1965, Prisoner's Dilemma, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. (co-author; Albert M. Chammah)
  • 1966, Two-Person Game Theory: The Essential Ideas, Ann Arbor, MI, The University of Michigan Press. (reprinted by Dover Press, Mineola, NY, 1999).
  • 1969, Strategy and Conscience, Shocken Books, New York, NY. (first published in 1964)
  • 1970, N-Person Game Theory. Concepts and Applications, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. (reprinted by Dover Press, Mineola, NY, 2001).
  • 1974, Conflict in Man-made Environment, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.
  • 1975, Semantics, Crowell.[15]
  • 1986, General System Theory. Essential Concepts and Applications, Abacus, Tunbridge Wells.
  • 1989, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict, Paragon House, New York.
  • 1989, Decision Theory and Decision Behaviour, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • 1992, Peace: An Idea, Whose Time Has Come, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
  • 2000, Certainties and Doubts: A Philosophy of Life, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 2000. His autobiography.
  • 2001, Skating on Thin Ice, RDR Books, Oakland, CA.
  • Рапопорт, А. Б. (2003). Три разговора с русскими. Об истине, любви, борьбе и мире. Прогресс-Традиция.
    ISBN 978-3830019558
    .    ).

Selected articles

  • 1948, "Cycle distributions in random nets." Bull. Math. Biophysics 10(3):145–157.
  • 1951, with Ray Solomonoff, "Connectivity of random nets." Bull. Math. Biophysics 13:107–117.
  • 1953, "Spread of information through a population with sociostructural bias: I. Assumption of transitivity." Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 15, 523–533.
  • 1956, with Ralph W. Gerard and Clyde Kluckhohn, "Biological and cultural evolution: Some analogies and explorations". Behavioral Science 1:6–34.
  • 1957, "Contribution to the Theory of Random and Biased Nets." Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 19:257–77.
  • 1960 with W.J. Horvath, "The theoretical channel capacity of a single neuron as determined by various coding systems". Information and Control, 3(4):335–350.
  • 1962, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory". Scientific American, 207:108–114.
  • 1963, "Mathematical models of social interaction". 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.
  • 1974, with Lawrence B. Slobodkin, "An optimal strategy of evolution". Q. Rev. Biol. 49:181–200
  • 1979, "Some Problems Relating to Randomly Constructed Biased Networks." Perspectives on Social Network Research:119–164.
  • 1989, with Y. Yuan, "Some Aspects of Epidemics and Social Nets." Pp. 327–348 in The Small World, ed. by
    Manfred Kochen
    . Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

About Rapoport

See also

References

  1. ^ Rapoport, Anatol. Conceptions of World Order: Building Peace in the Third Millennium. Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Archived from the original on 20 December 2019. Retrieved 15 July 2017.
  2. ^ Alisa Ferguson, "Rapoport was Renowned Mathematical Psychologist, Peace Activist, University of Toronto Bulletin, February 20, 2007
  3. ^ Anatol Rapoport at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ a b Ron Csillag, "Anatol Rapoport, Academic 1911–2007." The Globe and Mail (Toronto), January 31, 2007, p. S7
  5. ^
    hdl:2027.42/153763
    .
  6. ^ a b "Rapoport, Anatol". University of Toronto Libraries.
  7. OCLC 950889848
    .
  8. OCLC 174138884
    .
  9. ISBN 9781483103648
    .
  10. ^
    ISBN 9783319501307
    .
  11. ISBN 1560005696
    .
  12. ^ "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968, New York Post.
  13. ^ Alisa Ferguson, "Rapoport was Renowned Mathematical Psychologist, Peace Activist," University of Toronto Bulletin, February 20, 2007
  14. ^ Chesmak Farhoumand-Sims, "Memories of Anatol Rapoport," Peace Magazine, April 2007, p. 14
  15. S.I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action
    with more technical (mathematical and philosophical) material.

External links

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