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

[3] According to The 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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).

[12] 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.

[13] According to Thomas Homer-Dixon in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Rapoport "became anti-militarist quite soon after World War II.

He was a leading organizer of the first teach-ins against the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan, a model that spread rapidly throughout North America.

As its sole professor at the start, he used a rigorous, interdisciplinary approach to the study of peace, integrating mathematics, politics, psychology, philosophy, science, and sociology.

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.

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.