He was born on May 29, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary. He attended a Lutheran high school where he won first prize for mathematics competition for all high school students. His father owned a pharmacy and sent him to France, in 1939, to study chemical engineering at the University of Lyons. When World War II started, he returned home to attend the University of Budapest to study pharmacology. He received his B.A. degree in 1944.
When Hitler’s army captured Hungary, Harsanyi was put in a labor unit in 1944. His labor unit was to be deported to an Austrian camp. When they were at the railroad station, he managed to escape. He knew a Jesuit father, who hid him in the cellar in the monastery.
When the war ended, he re-enrolled in the University of Budapest. He received his Ph.D. degree in philosophy with minors in sociology and psychology, in 1947. After graduation, he became a junior faculty member at the University Institute of Sociology. Here, he met Anne Klauber, who was a student.
In 1954, Harsanyi was appointed as a lecturer in economics at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane. In 1956, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship and he spent the next two years at Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in economics.
He returned to Australia, but he felt isolated as the time game theory was practically unknown in the universities. He then received an appointment as a Professor of Economics, at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1964, he became a Visiting Professor and then a Professor at the Business School of the University of California, Berkeley.
Harsanyi was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. He was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study n Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He received an Honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Northwestern University.
John Harsanyi died on August 9, 2000, in Berkeley, California.