For our latest session of “10 Questions for the Historian of Science,” I asked Kim Plofker about her research, the field of history of science, and plans for the future. Kim visited ASTRA in December 2025, and she is affiliated with the Journey to the Stars: Digitising the Astral Manuscripts of David Edwin Pingree working group.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is your academic background?
Kim Plofker: my name is Kim Plofker, and I am Associate Professor of Mathematics, Union College, NY, USA.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in this?
Kim Plofker: I started academic life as an undergraduate mathematics major with engineering ambitions, and held a systems engineer position for a few years after college. But when I got interested in history of science nearly forty years ago, and particularly its connections with Sanskrit literature, I knew that was what I wanted to do.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your working theories and methods?
Kim Plofker: I work on the history of exact sciences, mostly mathematics and astronomy, in pre-modern Sanskrit, Arabic/Persian, and Latin corpora. It was sort of a convergence between a growing interest in mainstream history of science (which in the 1980s USA especially was predominantly conventionally Eurocentric and physics-focused) and a random recreational-education encounter with learning Sanskrit that became a lifelong passion. I was gearing up for graduate school applications to history of science PhD programs but didn't want to let go of Sanskrit. So I asked my Sanskrit professor (yes, Harvard had and maybe still has an introductory Sanskrit course in its Division of Continuing Education) if there was any place where I could study history of science in Sanskrit. (Was there even any Sanskrit science? I knew nothing!). She pointed me toward David Pingree in the Brown University Department of the History of Mathematics, and that’s how that happened.
The academic tradition I was trained in, informally known as the “Neugebauer school” after the extremely influential pioneering 20th-century researcher Otto Neugebauer, has typically been rather distrustful of “theory” and “methodology” as research equipment. Of course, all researchers have theories and methods, acknowledged or otherwise, but the Neugebauer school tends to prefer to leave them more or less implicit while we get on with reading and analyzing the sources. The lifeblood of this research is historical primary source texts in various languages, usually developed within learned traditions but sometimes reflecting nonspecialist popular practices, and the interactions between the scientific cultures that generated them. I’ve spent much time over the years surveying and studying such sources in manuscript archives, and have accumulated a stack of copies of works that I really want to read someday! Nowadays researchers are blessed, not to mention overwhelmed, with incredible numbers of digitized manuscript images that have been made available online, although that doesn’t stop us from poking around for some more obscure work that we’re trying to trace.
Once we have a text of interest, we attempt to collect all, or at least a representative sample of, its extant manuscript copies, and then get to work reading. The digital tools for textual scholarship that have emerged in my professional lifetime, some of which I’ve helped develop, have increased the power and scope of research so much, and new digital capabilities continue to expand the toolkit.
Ole Birk Laursen: How is your research situated within the field of the history of science?
Kim Plofker: Within the history of science, as a researcher in mostly non-European and pre-modern traditions, I’m in one of the most under-studied areas of a generally under-studied field. The topics themselves are not at all peripheral or secondary, addressing the core issues of understanding, quantifying, and modeling the universe that shaped science for most of the human population from antiquity to the early modern period. You realize how important this research is when you look at the number of encyclopedia articles and other general accounts that scholars in this area get asked to write, when an editor is trying to put together some non-Eurocentric survey of a major topic and needs somebody to contribute on “India”, or “China”, or “Islam”. Huge swathes of world intellectual history are condensed into a brief chapter or essay, because there’s still so much we don’t know about their development, and still so few scholars, comparatively speaking, who specialize in them.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the state of the history of science today?
Kim Plofker: The history of science today .... If it were a plant, I suppose I might call it “thriving but stressed”. We are learning so much in all areas of the discipline, and major projects are connecting different subfields very productively. At the same time (and as an American, I may be exaggerating the impact of this perspective, but I don’t think it’s unique to the US), in the broader culture there’s a strong strain of distrust about any “multicultural” approaches to scientific topics, and naive re-valorization of Eurocentrist views. I hasten to add that most scholars of history of European science don’t share this distrust, which is definitely more political than academic, but it does make itself felt in the atmosphere overall. The good news is that researchers are still continuing to work on all kinds of exciting, relevant and significant projects that keep opening up new vistas. So I think the momentum to go on exploring further in the history of the world’s sciences, in all directions and with an open mind, has become pretty much unstoppable. (Hoping not to jinx it by saying so!)
Ole Birk Laursen: Why do we need to study the history of science?
Kim Plofker: We need to study this subject, in the last analysis, for the same reason we need to study other forms of intellectual history: to understand what people of the past were thinking and how their ideas helped shape what we nowadays assume to be “necessary” or “inevitable” developments.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the value and impact of your research today? How does it connect with contemporary debates in broader society?
Kim Plofker: Like all researchers in under-studied fields, perhaps I contribute most by simply bringing little-known materials into the purview of the larger scholarly community. So much of what we learn in science, especially the mathematical sciences, is perceived as a spontaneous and unavoidable emergence of objectively true knowledge, whose logical demonstrability makes it hard to conceive of different ways of thinking about it. But that’s a pretty ahistorical and shallow way to understand human thinking. Getting out of our comfort zone and into the actual words of an old text reveals so much more.
Ole Birk Laursen: Are there any unusual stories you have come across in your research? Anything that changed your perception of dominant historical narratives?
Kim Plofker: Most of all, I’ve learned in this research that the history of ideas is definitely written by the victors. There’s an understandable whiggish tendency to assume that because things turned out a certain way in some field, then that was the way it had to be. Modern practices crowd out their earlier competitors, and people rapidly forget that their dominance wasn’t self-evidently assured right from the start. I’m currently looking into some debates in the development of models of planetary orbits that rejected Keplerian hypotheses of elliptical trajectories, as late as a century after Kepler’s time. Read the contemporary sources, and you see that resistance to what we now perceive as obviously superior theories wasn’t mere reactionism or ideological rejection. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to get all the bugs out of a scientific revolution!
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your plans for future research?
Kim Plofker: I can safely say that in my future research, I’ll continue reading a lot more texts! I suppose if there’s one general theme of my current pursuits, it’s attempting to follow the effects of the core medieval and early modern Indic/Islamic scientific interactions toward both east and west. I’m interested in learning how a number of Latin texts were adapted into, and others influenced by, Indic and Islamic traditions. I’ve also begun studying Literary Chinese, because I really want to see how Sanskrit and Chinese astronomical tables interacted.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the future of the history of science?
Kim Plofker: The history of science is going to be immensely impacted by the ongoing development of the digital humanities. Textual analysis, network analysis, structural study of technical diagrams, and so on are all making a huge difference to how we interact with our sources, and that will only accelerate. I’m somewhat wary of super-optimistic estimates of the supposedly imminent golden age of information to be brought about by large language models and AI development in general. I hope we don’t forget that LLMs know nothing except the things that the whole internet already knows. Which is a great deal, certainly, and LLMs’ speed and versatility in retrieving and presenting that knowledge constitutes a real breakthrough. But we need to continue seeking out and analyzing and thinking about all the vast wealth of human knowledge that the internet doesn’t already know, and that’s what will keep the future of our discipline flourishing.
Ole Birk Laursen: Thank you for participating in this interview.