Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya

Born: 15 Jan 1850 in Moscow, Russia
Died: 10 Feb 1891 in Stockholm, Sweden

    Sofia was attracted to mathematics at a very young age. Her uncle Pyotr Vasilievich Krukovsky, who had a great respect for mathematics, spoke about the subject. Sofia wrote in her autobiography:

The meaning of these concepts I naturally could not yet grasp, but they acted on my imagination, instilling in me a reverence for mathematics as an exalted and mysterious science which opens up to its initiates a new world of wonders, inaccessible to ordinary mortals.

    When Sofia was 11 years old, the walls of her nursery were papered with pages of Ostrogradski's lecture notes on differential and integral analysis. She noticed that certain things on the sheets she had heard mentioned by her uncle. Studying the wallpaper was Sofia's introduction to calculus.
    In 1871 Kovalevskaya moved to Berlin to study with Weierstrass, Königsberger's teacher. Despite the efforts of Weierstrass and his colleagues the senate refused to permit her to attend courses at the university. Ironically this actually helped her since over the next four years Weierstrass tutored her privately.
    By the spring of 1874, Kovalevskaya had completed three papers. Weierstrass deemed each of these worthy of a doctorate. The three papers were on Partial differential equations, Abelian integrals and Saturn's Rings. The paper on the reduction of abelian integrals to simpler elliptic integrals is of less importance but it consisted of a skilled series of manipulations which showed her complete command of Weierstrass's theory.
    In 1874 Kovalevskaya was granted her doctorate, summa cum laude, from Göttingen University. Despite this doctorate and letters of strong recommendation from Weierstrass, Kovalevskaya was unable to obtain an academic position. This was for a combination of reasons, but her sex was a major handicap.
    In 1878, Kovalevskaya gave birth to a daughter, but from 1880 increasingly returned to her study of mathematics. In 1882 she began work on the refraction of light, and wrote three articles on the topic.

    In June 1889 became the first woman since the physicist Laura Bassi and Maria Gaetana Agnesi to hold a chair at a European university.

    During Kovalevskaya's years at Stockholm, she carried out what many consider her most important research She taught courses on the latest topics in analysis and became an editor of the new journal Acta Mathematica.
    The topic of the Prix Bordin of the French Academy of Sciences was announced in 1886. Entries were to be significant contributions to the problem of the study of a rigid body. Kovalevskaya entered and, in 1886, was awarded the Prix Bordin for her paper Mémoire sur un cas particulier du problème de le rotation d'un corps pesant autour d'un point fixe, ou l'intégration s'effectue à l'aide des fonctions ultraelliptiques du temps.
    Kovalevskaya's last published work was a short article Sur un théorème de M. Bruns in which she gave a new, simpler proof of Bruns' theorem on a property of the potential function of a homogeneous body. In early 1891, at the height of her mathematical powers and reputation, Kovalevskaya died of influenza complicated by pneumonia.

You can find more about Kovalevskaya here.

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