User:PWilkinson/Arpad Szabo

Arpad Szabo (October 16, 1913 – September 13, 2001) was a Hungarian classical scholar who specialised in the fields of ancient philosophy, philology, history of science, and astronomy.

Szabo was professor of ancient philology at the University of Debrecen from the late 1930s to 1948. During this period, he first met both Imre Lakatos, who was one of his students in the early 1940s, and Alfred Renyi, who became professor of mathematics there shortly before Szabo left. (p. 283)

In 1946, Szabo was persuaded by Lakatos to join the Hungarian Communist Party. At about the same time, he obtained a fellowship at the Eötvös Collegium in Budapest, where Lakatos was then studying. (p. 283) At this time, Szabo and Lakatos intended to collaborate on a history of dialectics. (p.283) This plan was disrupted by Lakatos's expulsion from the Communist party in 1949 and imprisonment in 1950 and, despite some later discussions, never came to fruition. (p.284) However, this common interest was to lead both to Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations and to Szabo's The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics. (p.284) Szabo himself was expelled from the Communist Party in 1952, (p.284) although he kept his position at the Eötvös Collegium.

Árpád Szabó