I wonder if the author of the recent article in Aeon has discovered that the following strange tale is not true; and, therefore, there is no reason to retail it. It seems that shortly after World War II the man we know as Imre Lakatos found a box of shirts with the name Imre Lakatos on them where you would normally find a monogram. Since his initials were IL and the shirts were his size, he adopted the name! Amusing if true.
In any case, I am disappointed that the author did not mention the great little book by Lakatos called Proofs and Refutations, which is devoted to an imaginary study of Euler's formula about the sides, edges, and vertices of polyhedra in which exceptions to the formula (referred to as "monsters") are found and returned to respectability by amending the formula, which program is repeated at greater and greater levels of complexity (or "monstrosity"). I don't remember how the book ends; but, I wished it hadn't been thirty or forty years ago when I read it.
