Laura Polanyi Striker was an Austro-Hungarian historian, researcher and educator. She received a PhD in economic history from Budapest University, developed progressive pedagogical models for young learners, and was active in feminist and freemason societies. Striker came from a Jewish family of scholars, including economist and anthropologist Karl Polanyi and philosopher Michael Polanyi. Striker and her family immigrated to the United States during World War II.

In the mid-1940s, Striker joined American historian Bradford Smith's research project to write a new biography of Captain John Smith. Since Striker read Hungarian and Latin, she worked through non-English sources related to the many narratives about John Smith's experiences in Transylvania and Hungary. Striker's work addressed earlier scholarship by Hungarian-American historian Alfred Knopf, translated sources about John Smith, and in 1953 published her independent study, Captain John Smith's Hungary and Translyvania.

She married Sandor Striker in 1904 and had three children, including the designer Eva Striker Zeisel. Laura Polanyi Striker died in 1959.

For more on Striker's biography and career, see Lee Congdon's article, "The Hungarian Pocahontas: Laura Polayni Striker," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, July 1978.