Mandan Mishra (c. 8th century), a scholar of Mahishi in Mithila and a follower of the Mimamsa school, was so renowned that — by the famous legend — Adi Shankaracharya travelled to debate him, with Mandan’s own learned wife Bharati as judge. The encounter is one of the great set-pieces of Indian intellectual history.
His prominence — for a time greater than Shankara’s own — speaks to Mithila’s standing as a seat of philosophy in the early medieval age.