Sofia Kovalevskaya

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Sonya Kovalevskaya

Born 15 January 1850(1850-01-15)
Moscow, Russia
Died 10 February 1891 (aged 41)
Stockholm, Sweden

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (Russian Софья Васильевна Ковалевская). (January 15, 1850-February 10, 1891), was the first major Russian female mathematician, and also the first woman who was appointed to a full professorship in Europe in 1889 (Sweden). Her first name is sometimes given as Sonya. There are many alternative spellings used for her names; she herself used Sophie Kowalevski (or occasionally Kowalevsky) in her publications.

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[edit] Life and career

Sofia Kovalevskaya was born in Moscow, Russia of an artillery officer and a German scholar, being the second of three children. Her father nurtured her interest in mathematics and hired Strannoliubskii to tutor her in calculus. However, at the time she could not get a university degree except by going to Europe with the permission of her father or her husband. Thus, she entered a marriage of convenience with Vladimir O. Kovalevsky, then a young paleontology student, with whom she left Russia, in company also of her sister Anyuta.

Kovalevskaya was admitted in 1869 to the University of Heidelberg, Germany, which allowed her to study as long as the professors involved approved. Shortly after beginning her studies there, she visited London with her husband Vladimir, who visited his acquaintances Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin, while Sonya was invited to one of George Eliot's Sunday salons. There, at age nineteen, she met Herbert Spencer and was led into a debate, at George Eliot's instigation, on "woman's capacity for abstract thought". This was well before she made her notable contribution of the "Kovalevski top" to the brief list of known examples of integrable rigid body motion. George Eliot was writing Middlemarch at the time, in which one finds the remarkable sentence: "In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could hardly be less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid." (Middlemarch, Chapter IV).

After two years of mathematical studies at Heidelberg, she moved to the University of Berlin, where she had to take private lessons from Karl Weierstrass since the university didn't admit women at all. Kovalevskaya prepared three different doctoral dissertations before settling on a fourth one that, with the support of Weierstrass, earned her a doctorate summa cum laude from the University of Göttingen in 1874. This meant that her achievements were so impressive, that the University did not require her to attend any lectures or examinations in order to award her the degree. Her result, now known as the Cauchy-Kowalevski theorem, was published in (Kowalevski 1875). Thus, Sofia Kovalevskaya became the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics.

The return of the Kovalevskys to Russia was futile, as no university would hire them with their European degrees. Returning to Germany, they consummated their marriage leading to the birth of a daughter, Sofia “Fufa.” When the girl turned one year old, Kovalevskaya resumed her work in mathematics.

After Kovalevsky's suicide in 1883, Kovalevskaya, with the support of Gösta Mittag-Leffler, was offered a position as a private docent at the Stockholm University in Sweden. The next year she was on tenure-track and began editing Acta Mathematica. In 1888 she won the French Prix Bordin for her work (Kovalevsky 1989) on the Kovalevsky top, which included analysis of the dynamics of Saturns rings. In 1889 she won a prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the same year was appointed professor in Stockholm University, while she also achieved a chair in the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was never offered a professorship in Russia, but received other honors from her homeland when she died of pneumonia in 1891 at forty-one.

[edit] Tributes

Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day is a program named after Kovalevsky and is a grant-making initiative of the Association for Women in Mathematics(AWM), funding workshops around the country which encourage girls to explore mathematics.

The Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture is sponsored annually by the AWM, and is intended to highlight significant contributions of women to applied or computational mathematics. Past honorees have included Irene Fonseca (2006), Ingrid Daubechies (2005), Joyce R. McLaughlin (2004) and Linda R. Petzold (2003).

The Kovalevskaya crater on the Moon is named in her honour.

[edit] In Film

Sofia Kovalevskaya has been the subject of two Russian film biographies.

Directed by Iosef Shapiro, starring Yelena Yunger, Lev Kosolov and Tatyana Sezenyevskaya

Directed by Ayan Shakhmaliyeva, starring Yelena Safonova, Vladimir Letenkov, and Natalya Sayov.

[edit] Selected publications

[edit] References

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
  • 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)
  • A. H. Koblitz, Sofia Vasilevna Kovalevskaia in Louise S. Grinstein (Editor), Paul J. Campbell (Editor) (1987). Women of Mathematics: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, New York. ISBN 978-0313248498. 

This article incorporates material from Sofia Kovalevskaya on PlanetMath, which is licensed under the GFDL.

[edit] External links

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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