John Harsanyi

Origins and early life

John Charles Harsanyi was born in Budapest on 29 May 1920, the only child of pharmacy owners, and at the Lutheran Gymnasium he won first prize in the national mathematics competition in 1937. Both his parents were Jewish and had converted to Catholicism; he described himself as being of Jewish origin, and after the war, then a devout Catholic, he studied theology in a Dominican seminary before losing his faith in his late twenties.

Work and career

Studying pharmacy kept him out of the Hungarian army's forced labour units, but after the German occupation of March 1944 he served in one from May to November, wearing the white armband that marked Christians of Jewish origin. When the Nazis decided to deport his unit to a concentration camp in Austria, where most of his comrades perished, he escaped at the Budapest railway station and a Jesuit father hid him in a monastery cellar.

He took a doctorate in philosophy in Budapest in 1947, lost his university post in 1948 as an outspoken anti-Marxist, and in April 1950 fled across the border with Anne Klauber, whom he married in Sydney on 2 January 1951. Working in factories by day and studying economics at night, he took a master's degree in Sydney in 1953, then a doctorate at Stanford under Kenneth Arrow, and settled at Berkeley in 1964.

Recognition

In a three-part paper of 1967 and 1968 he showed how to analyse games in which players do not know one another's preferences, by treating each player as one of several types, which the Nobel committee called the foundation for nearly all economic analysis involving information. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Nash and Reinhard Selten “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games”.

He also wrote on utilitarian ethics, retired in 1990 and died of a heart attack in Berkeley on 9 August 2000, after a period of Alzheimer's disease.