19 Facts About Sofya Kovalevskaya

Sofya Kovalevskaya herself used Sophie Kowalevski in her academic publications.

Sofya Kovalevskaya was born in Moscow, the second of three children.

Sofya Kovalevskaya became a full member of the St Petersburg Academy of Science and head of its astronomical observatory.

Sofya Kovalevskaya was tutored privately in elementary mathematics by Iosif Ignatevich Malevich.

In October 1870, Sofya Kovalevskaya moved to Berlin, where she began to take private lessons with Karl Weierstrass, since the university would not allow her even to audit classes.

Sofya Kovalevskaya was very impressed with her mathematical skills, and over the subsequent three years taught her the same material that comprised his lectures at the university.

In 1871 she briefly traveled to Paris together with Vladimir in order to help in the Paris Commune, where Sofya Kovalevskaya attended the injured and her sister Anyuta was active in the Commune.

Sofya Kovalevskaya returned to Berlin and continued her studies with Weierstrass for three more years.

Sofya Kovalevskaya thereby became the first woman to have been awarded a doctorate in mathematics.

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

Sofya Kovalevskaya met Mittag-Leffler's sister, the actress, novelist, and playwright Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler.

In 1884 Sofya Kovalevskaya was appointed to a five-year position as Extraordinary Professor and became an editor of Acta Mathematica.

Sofya Kovalevskaya's submission featured the celebrated discovery of what is known as the "Kovalevskaya top", which was shown to be the only other case of rigid body motion that is "completely integrable" other than the tops of Euler and Lagrange.

In 1889 Sofya Kovalevskaya was appointed Ordinary Professor at Stockholm University, the first woman in Europe in modern times to hold such a position.

Sofya Kovalevskaya, who was involved in the progressive political and feminist currents of late nineteenth-century Russian nihilism, wrote several non-mathematical works as well, including a memoir, A Russian Childhood, two plays and a partly autobiographical novel, Nihilist Girl.

In 1889, Sofya Kovalevskaya fell in love with Maxim Kovalevsky, a distant relation of her deceased husband, but insisted on not marrying him because she would not be able to settle down and live with him.

Sofya Kovalevskaya died of flu complicated by pneumonia in 1891 at age forty-one, after returning from a vacation in Nice with Maxim.

Sofya Kovalevskaya is buried in Solna, Sweden, at Norra begravningsplatsen.

Sofya Kovalevskaya has been the subject of three film and TV biographies.