Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic, and social commentator. He is recognized as one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, known for his rejection of classical inductivist views on the scientific method. Popper championed empirical falsification, made possible by his falsifiability criterion, arguing that a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven but can be scrutinized and falsified.