Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos (, ; Lakatos Imre ; 9 November 1922 – 2 February 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the "research programme" in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipsitz to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1922.

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 and subsequent wife, formed soon after that event a Marxist resistance group.

In May of that year, the group was joined by Éva Izsák, a 19-year-old Jewish antifascist activist.

Lakatos, 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.

Subsequently, a member of the group took her to Debrecen and gave her cyanide.

During the occupation, Lakatos avoided Nazi persecution of Jews by changing his surname to Molnár.

His mother and grandmother were murdered in Auschwitz.

He changed his surname once again to Lakatos (Locksmith) in honor of Géza Lakatos.

In fact, Lakatos was a hardline Stalinist and, despite his young age, had an important role between 1945 and 1950 (his own arrest and jailing) in building up the Communist rule, especially in cultural life and the academia, in Hungary.

After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life, doing mathematical research and translating George Pólya's How to Solve It into Hungarian.

After the war, from 1947, he worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education.

He also continued his education with a PhD at Debrecen University awarded in 1948 and also attended György Lukács's weekly Wednesday afternoon private seminars.

He also studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949.

When he returned, 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.

Still nominally a communist, his political views had shifted markedly, and he was involved with at least one dissident student group in the lead-up to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

After the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in November 1956, Lakatos fled to Vienna and later reached England.

He lived there for the rest of his life however he never achieved a British citizenship.

In 1960, he was appointed to a position in the London School of Economics (LSE), where he wrote on the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science.

The LSE philosophy of science department at that time included Karl Popper, Joseph Agassi and J. O. Wisdom.

It was Agassi who first introduced Lakatos to Popper under the rubric of his applying a fallibilist methodology of conjectures and refutations to mathematics in his Cambridge PhD thesis.

He received a PhD in philosophy in 1961 from the University of Cambridge; his doctoral thesis was entitled Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery, and his doctoral advisor was R. B. Braithwaite.

The book Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, published after his death, is based on this work.

But its first chapter is Lakatos' own revision of its chapter 1 that was first published as Proofs and Refutations in four parts in 1963–64 in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

It is largely taken up by a fictional dialogue set in a mathematics class.

The students are attempting to prove the formula for the Euler characteristic in algebraic topology, which is a theorem about the properties of polyhedra, namely that for all polyhedra the number of their vertices V minus the number of their edges E plus the number of their faces F is 2 (V − E + F = 2).

With co-editor Alan Musgrave, he edited the often cited Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, the Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965.

Published in 1970, the 1965 Colloquium included well-known speakers delivering papers in response to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In January 1971, he became editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, which J. O. Wisdom had built up before departing in 1965, and he continued as editor until his death in 1974, after which it was then edited jointly for many years by his LSE colleagues John W. N. Watkins and John Worrall, Lakatos's ex-research assistant.

He remained at LSE until his sudden death in 1974 of a heart attack at the age of 51.

The Lakatos Award was set up by the school in his memory.

His last lectures along with some correspondance were published in Against Method.

His last lectures along with parts of his correspondence with Paul Feyerabend have been published in For and Against Method.

Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics was inspired by both Hegel's and Marx's dialectic, by Karl Popper's theory of knowledge, and by the work of mathematician George Pólya.

Lakatos and his colleague Spiro Latsis organized an international conference in Greece in 1975, and went ahead despite his death.

It was devoted entirely to historical case studies in Lakatos's methodology of research programmes in physical sciences and economics.

These case studies in such as Einstein's relativity programme, Fresnel's wave theory of light and neoclassical economics, were published by Cambridge University Press in two separate volumes in 1976, one devoted to physical sciences and Lakatos's general programme for rewriting the history of science, with a concluding critique by his great friend Paul Feyerabend, and the other devoted to economics.

The 1976 book Proofs and Refutations is based on the first three chapters of his 1961 four-chapter doctoral thesis Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery.