The philosopher in John Harsanyi saw in game theory a means of improving the human condition.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi

Hungary entered the second world war on the side of Germany and Mr Harsanyi, a Jew, was imprisoned.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi

In paper after paper, Mr Harsanyi and his colleagues took the theory further.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi

Von Neumann was an American mathematician who, by coincidence, had also been born in Hungary and had attended the same school as Mr Harsanyi.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi

As a young man in Budapest Mr Harsanyi had studied philosophy and mathematics and, to please his parents who ran a pharmacy, he added chemistry.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi

Unknown Slovakians Lubomir Michalik and Zoltan Harsanyi came in for nothing.

BBC: Fan power sends Megson packing

Mr Harsanyi put up with it for a time, and continued with his studies, but in 1950 he left for Australia, about as far away from Europe as he could get.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi

Under Bush, writes Harsanyi, the regulatory load increased 29%.

FORBES: The Worse, The Better

Mr Harsanyi made his way quite swiftly up the academic ladder, first in Australia and then in the United States, where he was a professor in the business school of the University of California at Berkeley for 26 years.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi

Mr Harsanyi, who shared a Nobel prize in 1994 with two other economists in the same field, John Nash and Reinhard Selten, was happy to acknowledge that game theory had been around in some form for a long time.

ECONOMIST: John Harsanyi