Famous Scientist ( Sofia Kovalevskaya )

-: Sofia Kovalevskaya :-

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, was the first major Russian female mathematician, responsible for important original contributions to analysis, differential equations and mechanics, and the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe. She was also one of the first females to work for a scientific journal as an editor.

There are some alternative transliterations of her name. She herself used Sophie Kowalevski (or occasionally Kowalevsky), for her academic publications. After moving to Sweden, she called herself Sonya.

Sofia Kovalevskaya (née Korvin-Krukovskaya), was born in Moscow, the second of three children. Her father, Vasily Vasilyevich Korvin-Krukovsky, was Lieutenant-General of Artillery who served in the Imperial Russian Army. Her mother, Yelizaveta Fedorovna Schubert, was a scholarly woman of German ancestry and Sofia's grandmother was Romani. When she was 11 years old, the wall paper in her room had differential and integral analysis, which was her early preparation for calculus.

They nurtured her interest in mathematics and hired a tutor, (A. N. Strannoliubskii, a well-known advocate of higher education for women) who taught her calculus. During that same period, the son of the local priest introduced her to nihilism.

That year, with the help of the mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, whom she had known as a fellow student of Weierstrass', Kovalevskaya was able to secure a position as a privat-docent at Stockholm University in Sweden.

The following year (1884) she was appointed to a five year position as "Professor Extraordinarius" (Professor without Chair) and became the editor of Acta Mathematica. In 1888 she won the Prix Bordin of the French Academy of Science, for her work on the question: "Mémoire sur un cas particulier du problème de le rotation d'un corps pesant autour d'un point fixe, où l'intégration s'effectue à l'aide des fonctions ultraelliptiques du temps".

Her submission included the celebrated discovery of what is now known as the "Kovalevsky top", which was subsequently shown (by Liouville)[citation needed] to be the only other case of rigid body motion, beside the tops of Euler and Lagrange, that is "completely integrable".

In 1889 she was appointed Professor Ordinarius (Professorial Chair holder) at Stockholm University, the first woman to hold such a position at a northern European university.[citation needed] After much lobbying on her behalf (and a change in the Academy's rules) she was granted a Chair in the Russian Academy of Sciences, but was never offered a professorship in Russia.

Kovalevskaya wrote several non-mathematical works as well, including a memoir, A Russian Childhood, plays (in collaboration with Duchess Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler) and a partly autobiographical novel, Nihilist Girl (1890).

She died of influenza in 1891 at age forty-one, after returning from a pleasure trip to Genoa. She is buried in Solna, Sweden, at Norra begravningsplatsen