Karl Popper
Born in Vienna, he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy there. Although he disagreed with many tenets of the Vienna Circle, he was somehow associated with it and published his Logik der Forschung (later, Logic of Scientifc Discovery, 1959) in 1934; this book makes "falsification" the key concept and denounces "induction" or "confirmation", and it brought him a reputation.
Then he accepted a position in Canterbury University College, New Zealand, and taught there from 1937 to 1945; he wrote two important books while he was in New Zealand: The Open Sciety and its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957) which cover social sciences and the philosophy of politics. Strong interests in these fields (he was sympathetic to Marxism when he was young but later he hated it as a form of holism) distinguish him from most other philosophers of science.
In 1946 he moved to London School of Economics; and he contributed greatly to making it one of the world-renowned centers for philosophy of science. An important anthology, Conjectures and Refutations was published in 1963; this contains Popper's criticism of "dialectic", among others. In 1965, he and his followers criticized Thomas Kuhn in London, and the result is Lakatos & Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970) ; Lakatos formed his own methodology of "research programs" from this confrontation, but Popper did not like it. Popper was awarded a Kyoto Prize in 1992.
