Sofya Kovalevskaya

Sofia Kovalevskaya
Born	(1850-01-15)15 January 1850 Moscow, Russia
Died	10 February 1891(1891-02-10) (aged 41) Stockholm, Sweden

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (Russian: Со́фья Васи́льевна Ковале́вская). (Moscow, January 15, 1850 – Stockholm, Sweden, February 10, 1891), was the first major Russian female mathematician, and also the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Europe.

There are some alternative spellings used for her name. She herself used Sophie Kowalevski (or occasionally Kowalevsky), for her academic publications. After moving to Sweden, she became known as Sonya

Early Years

Sofia Kovalevskaya, née Sofia Vasilyevna Korvin-Krukovsky, was born in Moscow, the second of three children. Her father was a General who served as an artillery officer with Tsar Nicholas I. Her mother was a scholarly woman of German ancestry. They nurtured her interest in mathematics and hired a tutor, ( Alexandru Strannoliubskii , a well-known advocate of higher education for women) who taught her calculus and, co-incidentally, introduced her to nihilism. However, at that time, women could not get a university degree in Russia and could not go abroad without written permission from their fathers or husbands. Accordingly, she contracted a "fictitious marriage" with Vladimir Kovalevsky, then a young paleontology student who would later become famous for his collaborations with Charles Darwin. They emigrated from Russia in 1867.

Student Years

In 1869, Kovalevskaya began attending the University of Heidelberg, Germany, which allowed her to audit classes as long as the professors involved gave their approval. Shortly after beginning her studies there, she visited London with Vladimir, who spent time with his colleagues Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin, while she was invited to attend George Eliot's Sunday salons. There, at age nineteen, she met Herbert Spencer and was led into a debate, at 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 under such teachers as Helmholtz, Kirchoff and Bunsen, she moved to Berlin, where she had to take private lessons from Karl Weierstrass , as the university would not even allow her to audit classes. In 1874, Kovalevskaya prepared three different doctoral dissertations before settling on a fourth one that, with the support of Weierstrass, earned her a doctorate in mathematics summa cum laude from the University of Göttingen, bypassing the usual required lectures and examinations. She thereby became the first woman in Europe to hold that degree. Her dissertation described what is now known as the Cauchy-Kowalevski theorem.

Last Years in Germany and Sweden

The Kovalevskys returned to Russia, but failed to secure professorships because of their radical political beliefs (and, possibly, jealousy over their German degrees). Discouraged, they went back to Germany. Vladimir, who had always suffered severe mood swings, became more unstable so they spent most of their time apart. Then, for some unknown reason, they decided to spend several years together as an actual married couple. During this time their daughter, Sofia (called “Fufa”), was born. After a year devoted to raising her daughter, Kovalevskaya put Fufa under the care of her older sister, resumed her work in mathematics and left Vladimir for what would be the last time. In 1883, faced with worsening mood swings and the possibility of being prosecuted for his role in a stock swindle, Vladimir committed suicide.

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

The following year 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 French Prix Bordin, for her work on the question "Perfect in one important point the theory of the movement of a solid body round an immovable point". Her submission included the celebrated discovery of what is now known as the Kovalevsky top, which was subsequenly shown (by Liouville ) to be the only other case of rigid body motion, beside the tops of Euler and Lagrange, that is "complertely integrable". It is believed that the topic chosen for the prize was intended to favor her, as she was known to be preparing a significant paper in that field. She also contributed work on the dynamics of Saturns rings.

In 1889 she was appointed Professor Ordinarius (Professorial Chair holder) at Stockholm University, the first woman to hold such a position at a European university. 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, Reminiscences of Childhood, plays (in collaboration with Duchess Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler) and a partly autobiographical novel, Nihilist Girl (1890).

She died of pneumonia in 1891 at age forty-one, after returning from a pleasure trip to Genoa.

Tributes

Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day is a grant-making program of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), funding workshops across the United States 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 in the fields of applied or computational mathematics. Past honorees have included Irene Fonseca (2006), Ingrid Daubechies (2005), Joyce R. McLaughlin (2004) and Linda R. Petzold (2003).

The lunar crater Kovalevskaya is named in her honor.

In Film

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

• Sofya Kovalevskaya (1956) directed by Iosef Shapiro, starring Yelena Yunger, Lev Kosolov and Tatyana Sezenyevskaya.

• Berget På Månens Baksida ("A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon") (1983) directed by Lennart Hjulström, starring Gunilla Nyroos as Sofja Kovalewsky and Bibi Andersson as Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, Duchess of Cajanello, and brother to Gösta Mittag-Leffler.

• Sofya Kovalevskaya (1985 TV) directed by Ayan Shakhmaliyeva, starring Yelena Safonova, Vladimir Letenkov and Natalya Sayov.

Selected publications

• Kowalevski, Sophie (1875), "Zur Theorie der partiellen Differentialgleichung", Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 80: 1–32 (The surname given in the paper is "von Kowalevsky".)
• Kowalevski, Sophie (1884), "Über die Reduction einer bestimmten Klasse Abel'scher Integrale 3ten Ranges auf elliptische Integrale", Acta Mathematica, 4 (1): 393–414, doi:10.1007/BF02418424
• Kowalevski, Sophie (1885), "Über die Brechung des Lichtes In Cristallinischen Mitteln", Acta Mathematica, 6 (1): 249–304, doi:10.1007/BF02400418
• Kowalevski, Sophie (1889), "Sur le probleme de la rotation d'un corps solide autour d'un point fixe", Acta Mathematica, 12 (1): 177–232, doi:10.1007/BF02592182
• Kowalevski, Sophie (1890), "Sur une propriété du système d'équations différentielles qui définit la rotation d'un corps solide autour d'un point fixe", Acta Mathematica, 14 (1): 81–93, doi:10.1007/BF02413316
• Kowalevski, Sophie (1891), "Sur un théorème de M. Bruns", Acta Mathematica, 15 (1): 45–52, doi:10.1007/BF02392602

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)
• 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. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)

Sofia Kovalevskaya at PlanetMath.

External links

• Sofya Kovalevskaya at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• "Sofia Kovalevskaya", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Sofya Kovalevskaya", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• Women's History - Sofia Kovalevskaya
• Brief biography of Sofia Kovalevskaya by Yuriy Belits. University of Colorado at Denver, March 17, 2005.
• Biography (in Russian)
• Association for Women in Mathematics
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