28 Facts About Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos 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 for introducing the concept of the "research programme" in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

Imre Lakatos received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944.

Imre 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.

Imre Lakatos changed his surname to Lakatos in honor of Geza Lakatos.

Imre Lakatos studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949.

Imre Lakatos was a hardline Stalinist and, despite his young age, had an important role between 1945 and 1950 in building up the Communist rule, especially in cultural life and the academia, in Hungary.

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

Imre Lakatos 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.

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

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

Imre Lakatos termed the polyhedral counterexamples to Euler's formula monsters and distinguished three ways of handling these objects: Firstly, monster-barring, by which means the theorem in question could not be applied to such objects.

Imre Lakatos proposed an account of mathematical knowledge based on the idea of heuristics.

In Proofs and Refutations the concept of "heuristic" was not well developed, although Imre Lakatos gave several basic rules for finding proofs and counterexamples to conjectures.

Imre Lakatos thought that mathematical "thought experiments" are a valid way to discover mathematical conjectures and proofs, and sometimes called his philosophy "quasi-empiricism".

Imre Lakatos is concerned that historians of mathematics should not judge the evolution of mathematics in terms of currently fashionable theories.

Imre Lakatos is critical of those who would see Cauchy's proof, with its failure to make explicit a suitable convergence hypothesis, merely as an inadequate approach to Weierstrassian analysis.

Imre Lakatos sees in such an approach a failure to realize that Cauchy's concept of the continuum differed from currently dominant views.

Imre Lakatos sought to replace Kuhn's paradigm, guided by an irrational "psychology of discovery", with a research programme no less coherent or consistent, yet guided by Popper's objectively valid logic of discovery.

Imre Lakatos was following Pierre Duhem's idea that one can always protect a cherished theory from hostile evidence by redirecting the criticism toward other theories or parts thereof.

Imre Lakatos saw himself as merely extending Popper's ideas, which changed over time and were interpreted by many in conflicting ways.

Imre Lakatos claimed that not all changes of the auxiliary hypotheses of a research programme are equally productive or acceptable.

Imre Lakatos took the view that these "problem shifts" should be evaluated not just by their ability to defend the "hard core" by explaining apparent anomalies, but by their ability to produce new facts, in the form of predictions or additional explanations.

Imre Lakatos' model provides for the possibility of a research programme that is not only continued in the presence of troublesome anomalies but that remains progressive despite them.

Paul Feyerabend argued that Imre Lakatos's methodology was not a methodology at all, but merely "words that sound like the elements of a methodology".

Imre Lakatos argued that Lakatos's methodology was no different in practice from epistemological anarchism, Feyerabend's own position.

Imre Lakatos wrote in Science in a Free Society that:.

Imre Lakatos realized and admitted that the existing standards of rationality, standards of logic included, were too restrictive and would have hindered science had they been applied with determination.

Imre Lakatos therefore permitted the scientist to violate them.