Sofia Kovalevskaya

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Sofia Kovalevskaya
Born 15 January 1850
Moscow, Russia
Died 10 February 1891
Stockholm, Sweden

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (Софья Васильевна Ковалевская) (also known as Sonia Kovalevsky) (January 15, 1850 – February 10, 1891) was the first major Russian female mathematician and a student of Karl Weierstrass in Berlin. In 1884, she was appointed professor at Stockholm University, the third woman in Europe to become a professor.

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[edit] Early years

Kovalevskaya was born in Moscow, Russia. Her father was Vasily Vasilievich Krukovsky (1800-1874), an artillery officer, later general, of Polish descent. Krukovsky was a distant descendant of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus; in 1858 the Russian authorities confirmed his noble status, and Krukovsky was permitted to change his surname to Korvin-Krukovsky, in other words, to add "Korvin" (the Krukowski's coats-of-arms) to his family name. "Korvin" comes from "Corvus" (Latin "crow"), and the Polish name "Krukovsky" comes from "kruk" (Polish "crow"), too.

Her mother was Elizaveta Fyodorovna Schubert (1820-1879), a German. She was granddaughter of Theodor Schubert aka Fyodor Ivanovich Schubert (mathematician and astronomer of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences) via Fyodor Fyodorovich Schubert (another Academician) and had more education and "appreciation of the finer things" than her husband.

As Vasily Vasilievich Krukovsky had a Polish father, and a Russian mother, Kovalevskaya was only a quarter-Russian by descent. She had great appreciation for the Polish revolutionary movement of the 19th century.

There seem to have been several roots to Sofia's mathematical bent. Some came from her father, accidentally; he had studied calculus in the army, and when they ran short of proper wallpaper for one house, he used lithographed notes from lectures by Ostrogradsky instead. Sofia spent many hours of childhood scrutinising the strange scribbles. Something of it seems to have stuck for when she later took calculus it came to her very quickly, as if it had always been there.

She adored her uncle Pyotr Vasilievich Krukovsky, a self-taught eccentric with especial fondness for mathematics.

While reading a book on optics given to her by a family friend, she came across trigonometric concepts unfamiliar to her at the time, which she tried to explain on her own. She explained it in the same manner it was explained historically, and the friend was so impressed he implored Sophia's father to let her take private mathematical study, calling her "a new Pascal" in the process.

Kovalevskaya had a crush on Fyodor Dostoevsky and practiced his favourite piano work, Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, to get his attention, but he was focused on the older sister Anna and he very probably proposed to her.

[edit] Scientific work

In 1874, in her absence, University of Goettingen with support of Karl Weierstrass, granted Kovalevskaya PhD in Mathematics and Master of Fine Arts degrees summa cum laude for the cycle of three papers, which included important results on the theory of partial differential equation and its applications to the study of the shape of rings of Saturn. In the same year she returned to Russia, but failed to get a job at the St Petersburg University. After that Kovalevskaya stopped her scientific work for six years in favor of the literary one.

In 1880, Kovalevskaya moved to Moscow but was not allowed to take an examination for the Master degree in the university. A year later she left Moscow for Berlin and Paris, trying to get a professor's job there.

She also essentially completed the study of rotating solids, applying the then-new theory of Abelian functions (and thus "justifying" the enormous effort that was put into the theory). For this study, namely for the paper On the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point, Kovalevskaya was awarded a special prize by the Paris Academy of Science in 1888. In the next year she was awarded the prize of Swedish Academy of Science for her second work on this subject.

As late as in 1889, she became the first female Correspondent Member of St. Petersburg Academy of Science, being elected there on the initiative of Pafnuty Chebyshev among others.

Kovalevskaya died of influenza, complicated by pneumonia, in Stockholm and is interred there in the Norra begravningsplatsen.

There were two biographical movies released about her in the USSR in 1956 and in 1985.

Some of her scientific works include:

  • Acta Mathematica (1885)
  • Mémoire sur un cas particulier du problème de la rotation d'un corps pesant autour d'un point fixe, ou l'intégration s'effectue à l'aide des fonctions ultraelliptiques du temps (1886)
  • The short article Sur un théorème de M. Bruns (1891)

[edit] Namesake events

Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day and the Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture are annual events sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), the largest organization of women mathematicians in the United States. The lectureship named for Kovalevsky is an honor awarded to a prominent woman in mathematics, science, or engineering; the lecture is usually given at the national meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Past honorees have included Daubechies (2005), McLaughlin (2004), and Petzold (2003). The high school program named for Kovalevsky is now a grant-making intitiative of the AWM, funding workshops around the country that invite girls to explore mathematics.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Roger Cooke: The Mathematics of Sonya Kovalevskaya (Springer-Verlag, 1984)
  • Sofya Kovalevskaya: A Russian Childhood (Springer-Verlag, 1978; translated and introduced by Beatrice Stillman)
  • Ann Hibner Koblitz: A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia -- Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary (Rutgers University Press, 1983)

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Persondata
NAME Kovalevskaya, Sofia Vasilyevna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ковалевская, Софья Васильевна (Russian)
SHORT DESCRIPTION First major Russian female mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow, Russia
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1891
PLACE OF DEATH Stockholm, Sweden
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