John Charles Polanyi (born 1929) was a Hungarian scientist whose work with chemical reactions led to the construction of a "chemical laser" and to a share of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

John Polanyi was descended from a gifted Hungarian family. His grandfather, Mihaly Pollacsek, was a successful railway builder, and his grandmother was active in the intellectual life of Budapest. From a line of assimilated Jews, Mihaly gave the family its Hungarian name, Polanyi. Among their remarkable children, Laura was an intellectual whose ideas of "rural sociology" influenced Tito. One son, Adolph, became an engineer and moved to Brazil. Another, Karl (1886-1964), was one of the century's influential critics of market capitalism. John's father, Michael, was an accomplished chemist and philosopher. When Hitler came to power, Michael moved his family from Berlin, where John was born (January 23, 1929), to England. He joined the faculty of Manchester University, where as...