Imre Lakatos

  • Born

    Lakatos was born on November 9, 1922, in Debrecen, Hungary under the name of Imre Lipschitz. Born into a Jewish family, He later changed his last name to Molnar and then changed it again to Lakatos due to the Nazi invasion.
  • College graduation

    In 1944 Lakatos received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen.
  • Received PhD

    Lakatos obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge with his work "Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery"
  • Professor at London School of Economics

    in 1960 Lakatos Started teaching at the London School of Economics
  • Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

    Imre Lakatos attempted to reconcile Karl Popper's falsificationism with Thomas Kuhn’s model of Paradigm shift. His major contribution to the philosophy of science was this idea of a scientific research program. He devised a research program consisting of ‘hard core’, emphasizing and evaluating a research program as ‘progressive’ or ‘degenerative’, instead of analyzing whether the hypothesis is true or false.
  • Death

    Lakatos died of a heart attack in 1974, London, United Kingdom
  • Proofs and Refutations

    Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery expounds Lakatos's view of the progress of mathematics. The book is written as a series of Socratic dialogues involving a group of students who debate the proof of the Euler characteristic defined for the polyhedron.
  • Lakatos Award

    The London School of Economics introduced the Lakatos Award in his memory , which is given to candidates who are making exceptional contributions to the philosophy of science.
  • Video

    Bektas, Oktay. “Lakatos' Philosophy of Science.” YouTube, YouTube, 24 Nov. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NQ9KLWL4DU.
  • Citations

    Lakatos, Imre., et al. For and Against Method Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence . University of Chicago Press, 1999, doi:10.7208/9780226467030. Larvor, Brendan. Lakatos : an Introduction . Routledge, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780203004548. Donnelly, Sue. “Introduction to the Archives of Imre Lakatos, 1922-1974.” Perspectives on Science, vol. 14, no. 3, MIT Press, 2006, pp. 347–53, doi:10.1162/posc.2006.14.3.347.