Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi

Damodar Kosambi Dharmananda ( born July 31, 1907 in Kosben, Goa, † June 29, 1966 in Pune, Maharashtra ) was an Indian mathematician and historian.

Life

He was the son of the scholar Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi (1876-1947), author of a biography of Buddha. He went to Cambridge (Massachusetts ) to school when his father did research there at Harvard University. He began his studies at Harvard in 1924, interrupted by a stay in India where his father had returned. He studied with George David Birkhoff mathematics and earned his bachelor's degree in 1929. On his return, he taught mathematics and German ( next he spoke good also French and Italian, a total he said over a dozen languages) at the Banares Hindu University and was in 1931 at the invitation of André Weil at the Aligarh Muslim University as a lecturer in mathematics. He specialized in differential geometry. In 1933 he became professor of mathematics at Fergusson College in Pune. He also published in 1944 an essay on genetics, in which he introduced a named after him mapping function ( Kosambi map function) and 1943 ( later called Karhunen- Loeve Development) on the development of stochastic processes based on orthogonal function systems.

His move to the science of history was initiated by work on numismatics. He also dealt with Sanskrit literature and published the work of the poet Bhartrihari. In the 1940s, he also turned to the Communist Party of India. He supported the independence movement and admired the Chinese Communist revolution. He visited China frequently in the 1950s. In the 1950s he was active in the peace movement and a member of the World Peace Council.

In 1945 he became Professor of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which he had to leave in 1962 due to its critical political setting. 1948/49, he was at the University of Chicago, London, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

As a historian, brought social and economic aspects in the historiography of India, where he was influenced by Marxism and examined, among other things, the ratio of tribe and caste, the Indian feudalism and the relationship of Buddhism to trading. Especially his book Introduction to the study of Indian history was influential in the 1950s because of his new perspective on the history. He turned and statistical methods can and generally a multidisciplinary approach to the history of science, so when he graduated from the statistical distribution of Münzgewichten their circulation time, and traveled extensively in India for archaeological and other field studies.

He dealt in particular with early Indian history ( Maurya Empire). He was friends with the doyen of historians of early Indian history AL Basham.

Writings

• The culture and civilization of ancient India in historical outline, Routledge and Kegan 1965
• Combined methods in Indology and other writings, Oxford University Press, Delhi 2002 ( Collected Essays, published by B. Chattopadhyaya )
• The Oxford India Kosambi, Oxford University Press, Delhi 2009