Kim Plofker
historian of mathematics
Kim Leslie Plofker (born November 25, 1964) is an American historian of mathematics, specializing in Indian mathematics.
Education and career
Born in Chennai, India, Plofker received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Haverford College. She received her Ph.D. in 1995 while studying with adviser David Pingree (Mathematical Approximation by Transformation of Sine Functions in Medieval Sanskrit Astronomical Texts) from Brown University, where she conducted research and later joined as a guest professor.
In the late 1990s, she was Technical Director of the American Committee for South Asian Manuscripts of the American Oriental Society, where she was also concerned with the development of programs for the text comparison. From 2000 to 2004, she was at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During 2004 and 2005, she was a visiting professor in Utrecht and at the same time Fellow of the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. She is currently an associate professor at Union College in Schenectady.
Contributions
Plofker deals with the history of Indian mathematics, the topic of her 2009 book Mathematics in India. She is particularly interested in the exchange of mathematics and astronomy between India and Islam in the Middle Ages and generally in the exact sciences between Europe and Asia from antiquity to the 20th Century.
With Clemency Montelle, she is the coauthor of Sanskrit Astronomical Tables (Springer, 2019).
The public source identifies “Kim Plofker” as historian of mathematics. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Plofker, historian and mathematics.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1741562. VIAF identifies the subject as 33930047. The Library of Congress control number is n2008042399. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1995, 2000 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kim Plofker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.