His father, Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, had studied ancient Indian texts with a particular emphasis on Buddhism and its literature in the Pali language.

[4] Kosambi was critical of the policies of then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, which, according to him, promoted capitalism in the guise of democratic socialism.

[5] Their father was tasked by Professor Charles Rockwell Lanman of Harvard University to complete compiling a critical edition of Visuddhimagga, a book on Buddhist philosophy, which was originally started by Henry Clarke Warren.

He was also granted membership to the esteemed Phi Beta Kappa Society, the oldest undergraduate honours organisation in the United States.

During his two years stay in Aligarh, he produced eight research papers in the general area of Differential Geometry and Path Spaces.

This means that the successful application of the theory needs the development of analytical power, the ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation.

For an intellectual, this means at least a few months spent in manual labour, to earn his livelihood as a member of the working class; not as a superior being, nor as a reformist, nor as a sentimental "progressive" visitor to the slums.

The experience gained from living with worker and peasant, as one of them, has then to be consistently refreshed and regularly evaluated in the light of one's reading.

[8] One of the most important contributions of Kosambi to statistics is the widely known technique called proper orthogonal decomposition (POD).

It was during this period that he started his political activism, coming close to the radical streams in the ongoing Independence movement, especially the Communist Party of India.

[citation needed] In the 1940s, Homi J. Bhabha invited Kosambi to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

In the spring semester of 1949, he was a visiting professor of geometry in the Mathematics Department at the University of Chicago, where his colleague from his Harvard days, Marshall Harvey Stone, was the chair.

In April–May 1949, he spent nearly two months at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, discussing with such illustrious physicists and mathematicians as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Marston Morse, Oswald Veblen and Carl Ludwig Siegel amongst others.

Kosambi's solution to India's energy needs was in sharp conflict with the ambitions of the Indian ruling class.

He visited China many times during 1952–62 and was able to watch the Chinese revolution very closely, making him critical of the way modernisation and development were envisaged and pursued by the Indian ruling classes.

All these contributed to straining his relationship with the Indian government and Bhabha, eventually leading to Kosambi's exit from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1962.

Due to the efforts of his friends and colleagues, in June 1964, Kosambi was appointed as a Scientist Emeritus of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) affiliated with the Maharashtra Vidnyanvardhini in Pune.

Kosambi, aged 58, passed away due to a myocardial infarction in the early hours of June 29, 1966, despite being declared generally fit by his family doctor the day before.

Basham, a well-known indologist, wrote in his obituary: Certain opponents of Marxism dismiss it as an outworn economic dogma based upon 19th century prejudices.

There is no reason why its formulation in the 19th century should make it obsolete and wrong, any more than the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday and Darwin, which have passed into the body of science...

No Marxist work contains incitement to war and specious arguments for senseless killing remotely comparable to those in the divine Gita.

Although Kosambi was not a practising historian, he wrote four books and sixty articles on history: these works had a significant impact on the field of Indian historiography.

[13] He understood history in terms of the dynamics of socio-economic formations rather than just a chronological narration of "episodes" or the feats of a few great men – kings, warriors or saints.

In the very first paragraph of his classic work, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, he gives an insight into his methodology as a prelude to his life work on ancient Indian history: According to A. L. Basham, "An Introduction to the Study of Indian History is in many respects an epoch making work, containing brilliantly original ideas on almost every page; if it contains errors and misrepresentations, if now and then its author attempts to force his data into a rather doctrinaire pattern, this does not appreciably lessen the significance of this very exciting book, which has stimulated the thought of thousands of students throughout the world.

Kosambi in the 1950s, is acknowledged the world over – wherever South Asian history is taught or studied – as quite on a par with or even superior to all that is produced abroad.

By statistical study of the weights of the coins, Kosambi was able to establish the amount of time that had elapsed while they were in circulation and so set them in order to give some idea of their respective ages."

A collection entitled "Science, Society And Peace" of Prof DD Kosambi's essays has been published in the 1980s [exact year to be mentioned...] by Academy of Political & Social Studies, Akshay, 216, Narayan Peth, Pune 411030.