Lawrence Christian Biedenharn was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on November 18, 1922. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in absentia in 1944 while serving in the United States Army. He returned to MIT in 1946 and completed his Ph. D. in theoretical nuclear physics in 1950. After graduation, he worked as a research physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

His teaching career began when he was hired as an assistant professor at Yale University in 1952. He joined the faculty at Rice University in 1954 and became an assistant professor there in 1956. He became a full professor at Duke University in 1961. Upon becoming Emeritus in 1992, Biedenharn moved to the University of Texas at Austin where he continued to teach as an adjunct professor until his death from kidney cancer in 1996. Biedenharn supervised 24 Ph.D. students.

Biedenharn was a prominent mathematical and theoretical nuclear physicist whose significant contributions to group theoretical methods in physics led to his worldwide recognition as one of the foremost leaders in modern theoretical physics. He published several textbooks and monographs as well as hundreds of articles, several of which were written in collaboration with prominent theorists who visited Duke University from all over the world to work with Biedenharn. Two of the articles he co-authored are among the 100 most cited Reviews of Modern Physics papers from 1955 to 1985. He served as editor of the Journal of Mathematical Physics from 1985-1992. Biedenharn was invited to lecture extensively throughout the U. S. and Europe.