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Imre Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipschitz in Debrecen, Hungary to a Jewish family. The events of World War II led to the eventual name change to Lakatos in order to avoid the Nazi persecution of Jews. .
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Lakatos received degrees in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen.
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Sometime after the 1957 Soviet crackdown in Hungary, Lakatos found his way to London and allied with fellow refugee and philosopher Karl Popper. This move marked the beginning of Lakatos's most notable works.
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Lakatos received his P.H.D in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
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1963-4 Lakatos had a four part paper pubslished by "The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science" which later became the first of four chapters in his post-mortem published "Proofs and Refutations." In the reading Lakatos tries to establish that no theorem of informal mathematics is final or perfect. "Proofs and Refutations" Retrieved 04Aug19 https://math.berkeley.edu/~kpmann/Lakatos.pdf
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Lakatos sort of bridged a gap between Popper's falsificationism and Kuhn's views. The structure of the research program was the "hard core" or not revisable claims of a program and the "protective belt" that can be revised in order to protect the "hard core" being refuted. "Lakatos's Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" retrieved 04Aug19 http://people.loyno.edu/~folse/Lakatos.html
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The refuting of the program will adjust the the protective belt. To measure if a program is progressing it will have to confirm predictions with observation. If adjustments to the protective belt only prevent the "hard core" from being refuted but makes the program unable to predict observations then the program is degrading. Check out this video!
https://youtu.be/ezJH8MTgTxQ -
Lakatos proposed a historiographical method for evaluating different theories of scientific method. By first comparing their successes in explaining the actual history of science and scientific revolutions. And then providing a histriographical framework for rationally reconstructing the history of science as anything more than merely inconsequential rambling. Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016) "Imre Lakatos" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/
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Lakatos died in London, England
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The book "Proof and Refutations" published postmortem is based on the first three chapters of his four chapter doctoral thesis and his own revised first chapter from his previous publication in "The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science."
