Imre Lakatos 1922 – 1974
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian-British philosopher of mathematics and science. After surviving the Second World War in the Hungarian Communist underground and later being imprisoned by the same regime, he fled to England in 1956 and joined the London School of Economics, where he taught for the rest of his life. His Proofs and Refutations is a brilliant dialogue on the development of a mathematical proof, while The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes developed an alternative to Popper and Kuhn in which the unit of scientific appraisal is not a single theory but an evolving research programme.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Hungarian-British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Imre Lakatos:
“Science is a research programme, not an isolated theory.”
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Attributed to Imre Lakatos:
“A research programme is progressive when it predicts novel facts.”
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Attributed to Imre Lakatos:
“The history of science is the history of competing research programmes.”
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Attributed to Imre Lakatos:
“Falsification alone cannot capture the rationality of science.”
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Attributed to Imre Lakatos:
“Mathematics is created by an open process of proofs and refutations.”