Many images of Karl Marx have been formed through the ideological filters of many marxisms and of the ideologies opposed to them since the middle of the nineteenth century. One such image identifies Karl Marx with the study of philosophy and political economy. In a parallel image Friedrich Engels is identified with the study of some natural sciences and military affairs. Since the last decades of the twentieth century Engels’s editing of the section devoted to Capital within Marx’s unfinished Critique of Political Economy, and hence his understanding of the tasks of that critique for the science of political economy, have come under some scrutiny. Marx’s study of mathematics has also received some attention over the last one hundred years. Many people, however, still remain unaware of the fact that Marx studied many natural sciences and some technologies throughout his life, in the context of his Critique of Political Economy and, owing to his independent interests in those disciplines. The present paper is a narrative on those studies of Marx.
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