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Birthdate
Imre Lakatos was a famous Hungarian philosopher, who was born on November 9, 1922, in a jewish family. As a person born on this date, Imre Lakatos is listed in our database as the 46th most popular celebrity for the day (November 9) and the 83rd most popular for the year (1922). -
Childhood
Lakatos's parents parted when he was very young and he was largely brought up by his grandmother and his mother who worked as a beautician. His father was a strict observer of the Jewish Sabbath, and from 1932 he attended a Jewish Realgymnasium (a secondary school with an emphasis on the sciences. -
Childhood Cont.
His mother and grandmother died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in the German Nazi invasion during World War II. He changed his surname once again to Lakatos (Locksmith) in honor of Géza Lakatos. -
College
He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. In March 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary and Lakatos along with Éva Révész, his then-girlfriend formed a group called, Marxist resistance group. In May of that year, the group was joined by Éva Izsák, a 19-year-old Jewish antifascist activist. Him, considering that there was a risk that she would be captured and forced to betray them, decided that her duty to the group was to commit suicide. -
College Cont.
He also studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949. However, he found himself on the losing side of internal arguments within the Hungarian communist party and was imprisoned on charges of revisionism from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos' activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known. After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life, doing mathematical research and translating George Pólya's How to Solve It into Hungarian. -
Career
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. -
Career Cont
While studying at Cambridge, he compiled a doctoral thesis ‘Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery’, which was published in four parts as ‘Proofs and Refutations’ in ‘The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science’ in 1963-64. With an intention to improve his work on ‘Proofs and Refutations’, he refused to publish it as a book. It was released after his death as ‘Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery’ in 1976. -
Major Works
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. -
Career Cont
He never failed to support his arguments with historical case studies, which is evident from his famous article, ‘Cauchy and the Continuum: The Significance of Non-Standard Analysis’. He taught at LSE for 14 years and served as the editor of the renowned ‘The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science’ from 1971, till his sudden death in 1974. -
Death
He died unexpectedly on February 2, 1974 at the age of 51, after suffering a heart attack, at the age of 51, thus leaving several of his projects in the philosophy of mathematics and science incomplete.