Imre Lakatos

He died unexpectedly on February 2, 1974, after suffering a heart attack, at the age of 51, thus leaving several of his projects in the philosophy of mathematics and science incomplete.

A number of his influential papers on the philosophy of science were published posthumously in two books, ‘Lakatos 1978s’ and ‘Lakatos 1978b’, by his two former students - Gregory Currie and John Worrall.

In 1978, his papers, previously published in several scholarly journals, were compiled and released posthumously as ‘Philosophical Papers’.

Imre Lakatos was born as Imre Lipschitz on November 9, 1922, in Debrecen, Hungary, into a Jewish family.

His mother and grandmother died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in the German Nazi invasion during World War II.

He completed his education from the University of Debrecen in 1944, graduating in mathematics, physics and philosophy.

He received his PhD from Debrecen University in 1948. In 1949, he studied briefly at the Moscow State University under Sofya Yanovskaya. Later, he obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cambridge in 1961.

In order to avoid the Nazi discrimination, he changed his surname to ‘Molnar’ and later, took upon ‘Lakatos’ (Locksmith) as his last name, inspired by Hungarian general Geza Lakatos, and became Imre Lakatos.

He was as an active communist during World War II and took up work in the Hungarian Ministry of Education as a senior official in 1947, after the war ended.

He landed himself in political trouble in 1950 since he didn’t agree to follow Russian orders without a valid reason and hence, was arrested on charges of revisionism and imprisoned for three years at a Stalinist prison.

He resumed his studies upon his release in 1953 and took up mathematical research, wherein he started translating mathematics books into Hungarian, including George Polya’s ‘How to Solve It’.

During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he left Hungary and traveled to Vienna and finally settled down in Great Britain for the rest of his life.

In 1960, he was hired at the London School of Economics (LSE) as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, where he wrote extensively on the philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics.

He tried to prove the Euler-Descartes theorem: V – E + F = 2 (i.e. V=Vertices, E=Edges, F=Faces) in his 1961 doctoral thesis, as a fictional conversation between a teacher and students in a mathematics class.

His major contribution in the philosophy of science was the idea of a scientific ‘research programme’, where he attempted to create a synthesis of Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific theory change and Karl Popper’s falsificationism.

He devised a research programme consisting of ‘hard core’, emphasizing on evaluating a research program as ‘progressive’ or ‘degenerative’, instead of analyzing whether the hypothesis is true or false.