He worked on non-Euclidean geometry, mathematical irrationality, freedom, Plato and Platonism, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel.
He was born in Satu Mare, the year after the Treaty of Trianon recognized it as a part of Romania, to a very religious Jewish family that had fled from the 1920 pogroms.
Tóth was the son of an official of the Habsburg army who had fought in Italy during the World War I with the twelfth Imperial-Royal Horse Artillery Regiment.
Subsequently, Imre enrolled at the King Ferdinand I University in Cluj; the teaching work of some outstanding faculty members seems to have at this stage reawakened his strong interest in mathematics.
As a detainee he worked out numerous reflections on The Quadrature of the Parabola, a treatise by Archimedes, laying the groundwork for future studies.