Kim Plofker
Kim Leslie Plofker (born November 25, 1964) is an American historian of mathematics, specializing in Indian mathematics.
Plofker received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Haverford College and her PhD in 1995 from Brown University with David Pingree (Mathematical approximation by transformation of Sine Functions in Medieval Astronomical Sanskrit text), where she conducted research and then later had been a guest professor.[1]
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. 2000 to 2004 she was at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2004 to 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 a visiting professor at Union College in Schenectady.
Plofker deals with the history of Indian mathematics, what in 2008 a book appeared by her, which has quickly established itself as a standard work.[1] 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.
In 2010 she gave a plenary lecture[2] at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Hyderabad (Indian rules, Yavana rules: foreign identity and the transmission of mathematics). In 2011, she was awarded the Brouwer Medal of the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society.[1]