Life

Imre Lakatos did important work in the 1960s and 1970s in the philosophy both of mathematics and science. He was born Imré Lipsitz in Debrecen Hungary, and by the time he left for England after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, he had already lived a complex, charged, and controversial life. A convinced and influential Marxist, he had been unofficial leader of a group of young Jews in hiding from the Nazis after the invasion in 1944. As a high ranking official in the Ministry of Education after the war, he was involved in significant and controversial education reform before being arrested by the secret police in 1953 and held for three years under appalling conditions, sometimes in solitary confinement, in Recsk—the worst of the Gulag-style camps in Hungary.

He studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Debrecen, graduating in 1944. He obtained a first...