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Birth to young adult
Imre Lakatos was born in Debrecen, eastern Hungary, on November 9, 1922. As a child, he excelled in school and won several competitions in mathematics and earned several awards. He would attend Debrecen University in 1940. During his time at Debrecen, he became a committed communist, attending illegal underground communist meetings. Lakatos would later graduate in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy in 1944. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/ -
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WW2
In 1944 Imre changed his last name to avoid persecution. He changed it from the Jewish name Lipsitz to the now known Lakatos. Sadly during the war, his mother and grandmother were taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz where they were killed. He and his father escaped capture. Imre escaped to Romania where he returned to his Marxist teachings. -
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Communist ways
Lakatos would later move to Budapest in 1946. He became a graduate student at Budapest University but spent much of his time working towards a communist takeover of Hungary. He was arrested in April 1950 on charges of revisionism and was condemned to the prison in Recsk. He was not released until 1953. -
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Lectures and Schoolhouses
In 1960 he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Karl Popper’s department at the London School of Economics. By 1969 he was Professor of Logic, with a worldwide reputation as a philosopher of science. -
Proofs and Refutations
Lakatos worked on and eventually published posthumously a book on mathematics. Many important logical ideas are explained in the book. For example, the difference between a counterexample to a lemma (a so-called 'local counterexample') and a counterexample to the specific conjecture under attack (a 'global counterexample' to the Euler characteristic, in this case) is discussed. Some of his ideas are still taught in upper-level schools. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/ -
Improving on Popper
Lakatos’s created his Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. He attempted to reconcile Popper’s falsificationism with the views of Thomas Kuhn. To sum up his theory, he stated that if something is falsified it does not mean that the proposed theory is immediately proven false. It means that the theory should evolve to something that comprises the original theory with a new idea that encludes the information that falsified the original theory. -
In his own words
Science VS psuedoscience
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Death
Imre suffered a sudden heart attack at the age of 51. The Lakatos Award was set up by the London School of Economics in his memory.
