Anuj Misra is a historian and philosopher of mathematics specialising in the study of pre-modern Islamicate and Sanskrit astronomy. Since April 2024, he has led the Max Planck Research Group "Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia" (ASTRA), concurrently serving as a Professor of the History of Science and the History of Knowledge at Freie Universität Berlin.

Professor Misra earned his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2016 for his dissertation on a seventeenth-century Sanskrit text on spherical geometry. Subsequently, he held postdoctoral positions at the Observatoire de Paris (Systèmes de Référence Temps Espace Laboratory, 2017-18) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Department I: Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge, 2018-19). From 2019 to 2021, he successfully conducted his "Early Modern Exchanges in Sanskrit Astral Sciences" (EMESAS) project at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (CCRS) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow. He continued at the CCRS as a Gerda Henkel Research Fellow during 2021-23, leading the "Changing Episteme in Early Modern Sanskrit Astronomy" (CEEMSA) project.

Professor Misra maintains affiliations with the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, as an Adjunct Senior Researcher in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, and with the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.

For a full CV, please see here.

WiSe 2024/25

• Thinking Across the Divide: Mathematics, History, and Society
• Mathematics, Society, and the Mind: A Seminar Series

The group "Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia" (ASTRA) studies the transmission, translocation, and transcreation of astral knowledge across space and time in Asian discourses. By examining the kinetics of astral learning across Asia, the group highlights the complex and ever-changing relationship between society and science from multilateral perspectives.

More details about ASTRA can be found here.

Publications: ORCID

Monographs

• Casting Shadows in the Sanskrit Sky: On Shades and Shadows in Kamalākara’s Siddhāntatattvaviveka (1658). Critically edited with an English translation and technical notes, 227 pages, Forthcoming.

• The Sanskrit astronomical table text Brahmatulyasāraṇī: Numerical tables in textual scholarship. Time, Astronomy, and Calendars, Volume 9, co-authored with Clemency Montelle and Kim Plofker, Leiden: BRILL, 2020, DOI: 10.1163/9789004432222

• Learning With Spheres: The golādhyāya in Nityānanda’s Sarvasiddhāntarāja. Scientific Writings from the Ancient and Medieval World, 400 pages, Oxford: Routledge, 2020, DOI: 10.4324/9780429506680

  Articles

• ‘Calendars, Compliments, and Computations: A Comparative Survey of the Canon in the Persian Zīj-i Šāh Jahānī and in its Sanskrit translation, the Siddhāntasindhu’, co-authored with Jean Arzoumanov, in: History of Science in South Asia, 11: 84–209, 2023, DOI: 10.18732/hssa95

• ‘Sanskrit Recension of Persian Astronomy: The computation of true declination in Nityānanda’s Sarvasiddhāntaraja’, in: History of Science in South Asia, 10: 68–168, 2022, DOI: 10.18732/hssa75

• ‘Persian Astronomy in Sanskrit. A comparative study of Mullā Farīd’s Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī and its Sanskrit translation in Nityānanda’s Siddhāntasindhu’, in: History of Science in South Asia, 9: 30–127, 2021, DOI: 10.18732/hssa64

• ‘Eclipse computation tables in Sanskrit Astronomy: A critical edition of the tables of Karaṇakesarī of Bhāskara (fl. c. 1681)’, co-authored with Clemency Montelle and Kim Plofker, in: History of Science in South Asia, 4: 1–79, 2016,
  DOI: 10.18732/H26P4V.

• ‘The poetic features in the Golādhyāya of Nityānanda’s Sarvasiddhāntarāja’, co-authored with Clemency Montelle and Krishnamurthi Ramasubramanian, in: Gaṇita Bhāratī, 38: 141–156, 2016.

Book Chapters

• ‘Recomputing Sanskrit Astronomical Tables: The Amṛtalaharī of Nityānanda (c. 1649/50 CE)’ in: Matthieu Husson, Clemency Montelle, and Benno van Dalen (eds.), Editing and Analysing Numerical Tables: Towards a Digital Information System for the History of Astral Sciences, Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus – Studies (PALS 2), Turnhout: Brepols, 187–249, 2021, DOI: 10.1484/M.PALS-EB.5.127699

Edited Books

• Science and Society in the Sanskrit World, Sir Henry Welcome Asian Series, Vol. 21, co-edited with C. Fleming, T. Knudsen, V. Sharma, Leiden: BRILL, 2023, DOI: 10.1163/9789004536869

Pre-prints of Accepted Articles/Book Chapters

•  ‘Indian mathematics in the early modern age’, co-authored with Clemency Montelle and Kim Plofker, 2023, https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04366706. To appear in the volume on the ‘History of Logic and Mathematics (16th–18th Centuries)’ in: Vincenzo Risi and Sara Confalonieri (eds.), The Encyclopedia of the History of Sciences, 2024/25, London: ISTE-Wiley.

Reviews

• Review of V. Katz, M. Folkerts, B. Hughes, R. Wagner, J. Lennart Berggren (eds.) Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Medieval Europe and North Africa, (Princeton University Press, 2016), in: Aestimatio 2.1: 128–140, 2021, https://ircps.org/aestimatio/aestimatio-ns-volumes/ns-0201-rev01/128-140/

• Review of Isabelle Pingree and John M. Steele (eds.), Pathways into the Study of Ancient Sciences: Selected Essays by David Pingree, (The American Philosophical Society Press, Philadelphia, 2014), in: Isis. A Journal of the History of Science Society 107(1): 146–147, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1086/685994