Lakatos was born Imre Lipschitz in Debrecen, Hungary in 1922. He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. He became an active communist during the Second World War.
After the war, he continued his education in Budapest (under György Lukács, among others) and worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education. 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.
After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life, doing mathematical research and translating George Pólya's How to Solve It into Hungarian. 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 received a doctorate in philosophy in 1961 from the University of Cambridge. The book Proofs and Refutations, published after his death, is based on this work.
In 1960 he was appointed to a position in the London School of Economics, 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 and John Watkins.
He remained at the London School of Economics until his death in 1974. The Lakatos Award was set up by the school in his memory.
Parts of his correspondence with his friend and critic Paul Feyerabend have been published in For and Against Method (ISBN 0226467740).
Books:
Barna Szénássy: History of Mathematics in Hungary until the 20th Century (Berlin-Heidelberg-New York, 1992);
Brendan Larvor (1998). Lakatos: An Introduction. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415142768.
Selected works:
Lakatos ed. (1970). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521078261;
Lakatos (1976). Proofs and Refutations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521290384;
Lakatos (1977). The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Lakatos (1978). Mathematics, Science and Epistemology: Philosophical Papers Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521217695
Biography:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Lakatos.html
Article:
Gábor Palló: Anti-Totalitarian Research Programs and Their Tacit Components
Links:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/lakatos/
This website has been established to commemorate the life and work of Imre Lakatos (1922-74) on his 80th birthday. To celebrate this occasion both audio and text versions of Science and Pseudoscience - one of Lakatos's last public talks before he died - are provided here.