Mahan Mitra studied at St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Calcutta, till Class XII.

He then entered the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, with an All India Rank (AIR) of 67 in the Joint Entrance Examination, where he initially chose to study electrical engineering but later switched to mathematics.

[5] Mahan Mitra joined the PhD program in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, with Andrew Casson as his advisor.

[8] He has widely published and presented his research in the area of hyperbolic manifolds and ending lamination spaces.

[11] Mj was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro.