Sonya Vasilievna Kovalevskaya Biography

Sonya Vasilievna Kovalevskaya has been applauded by some as the most astounding mathematical genius to surface among women in the last two centuries, and one of the first women to make contributions of high quality to the field.

The middle of three children, Kovalevskaya was born on January 15, 1850, in Moscow. Her father, Vasilli Korvin-Krukovski, was an Artillery General in the Russian army. He was a educated and disciplined man who was fluent in English and French, and was a stern but benevolent parent. Her mother, Elizaveta Fyodorovna Schubert, came from a family of German scholars who had emigrated to Russia in the mid-1700s. Kovalevskaya's grandfather, Fyodor Fyodorovich Schubert, and great-grandfather, Fyodor Ivanovich Schubert, were noted mathematicians.

A singular incident in Kovalevskaya's childhood seems to have been a portent of her devotion to the study of mathematics. While living at the family estate, she came upon a room where the wallpaper consisted of sheets of Mikhail Ostrogradsky's lithographed lectures on the differential and the integral calculus. The child spent hours trying to decipher the formulae. Years later, at the age of 15, she astonished her tutor with how quickly she grasped and assimilated the conceptions of differential calculus. Kovalevskaya wrote in her memoirs that she "vividly remembered the pages of Ostrogradsky . . . and the conception of space seemed to have been familiar to me for a long time."

It was also rather exceptional that her father allowed Kovalevskaya to study with a tutor at all. She described her father as one who "harbored a strong prejudice against learned women." It has been suggested that the best explanation is that Kovalevskaya's own fierce determination was the catalyst for changing her father's mind. Once the tutelage was over, however, she faced an uncertain future for obtaining advanced education. She knew her father would never agree to sending her to a university. During that time, women were not allowed to attend the universities in Russia and most fathers, including Kovalevskaya's, were unwilling to give consent to daughters to study abroad. Again, Kovalevskaya's determination was stronger than her father's will.

The device she used to get her way was a popular one at the time; she began searching for a husband. The type of husband she was looking for had to agree to sign papers allowing Kovalevskaya to travel, live apart from him, and pursue an education. The agreement also came with the understanding that the marriage was a platonic one, without the marital rights usually afforded a husband. She found such a man in Vladimir Kovalensky, who made his living translating and publishing books while pursuing a degree in paleontology. Along with his high intellect, Kovalensky also distinguished himself by supporting liberal causes.

The resistance by Kovalevskaya's family to the marriage was anticipated and overcome by using the same sort of guile that had created the situation. She sent notes to a number of distinguished family friends happily announcing her impending marriage, thereby forcing her father to either give public approval or publicly admit that his daughter was rebellious. To make certain her father would not renege on the announcement, Kovalevskaya ensconced herself in Kovalensky's apartment, refusing to leave, until she felt secure that the marriage would indeed take place. The couple was married in September 1868.

In early 1869 the newlyweds left Russia and settled in Heidelberg, Germany. This was where Kovalevskaya was to fulfill her dream of a higher education. Because she was a woman, the officials at the University of Heidelberg demanded that she secure the written permission of each of her professors before full admittance was granted. She undertook a class schedule of 22 hours per week, 16 of which were spent studying mathematics with Paul Du Bois-Reymond and Leo Köenigsberger, both of whom were students of the renowned mathematician Karl Weierstrass. After three successful semesters of study at the university, Kovalevskaya left for Berlin, seeking out Weierstrass. Their initial meeting marked a personal as well as professional relationship that lasted a lifetime.

Kovelevskaya did not arrive in Berlin unannounced, however. The praises of her professors at Heidelberg preceded her, and this did much to persuade Weisertrass' decision to become Kovelevskaya's mentor. In addition, Weierstrass had written a paper where he gave credit to Kovalevskaya's grandfather, Fyodor Schubert, for a mathematical maxim eight years before meeting Kovelevskaya. Unfortunately, winning Weierstrass' acceptance was not the only obstacle to the continuation of her studies--the university forbade women from attending Weierstrass' formal lectures. The obstacle was removed when Weierstrass agreed to teach Kovalevskaya privately twice a week, giving her the same courses as his regular university students.

In the beginning, Weierstrass never imagined that Kovalevskaya would want a formal degree in mathematics, believing that a married woman would have no use for one. In the fall of 1872 however, Kovalevskaya confided the truth about her marriage and he began to steer her toward work on a dissertation. By the spring of 1874, Kovalevskaya had written three doctoral dissertations, each of them in Weierstrass' opinion worthy of a degree, and one so outstanding that both were confident of forthcoming recognition. They were not disappointed. Weierstrass submitted Kovalevskaya's work to the University of Göttingen and she was awarded her doctoral summa cum laude in the fall of 1874, becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics.

Elated but exhausted by her labors, Kovalevskaya and her husband returned to Russia to relax with friends and family. Both were also hoping to secure positions in the academic world, but for a combination of reasons neither was welcomed to university posts. Kovalevskaya found herself discriminated against because of her gender, and Kovalensky's liberal activities spawned suspicion among Russian academics. Kovalevskaya and her husband decided to consummate their relationship, and Kovalevskaya's only child, Sofia, was born in 1878. For the next five years, Kovalevskaya and her husband put aside their respective fields of study and concentrated on trying to make a living at various commercial endeavors.

During this time it became apparent that Kovalevskaya was as gifted at writing as she was at mathematics and for a time her heart was torn between the two pursuits. The fiction she produced, including the novella Vera Barantzova, were met with acclaim and translated into several foreign languages. Meanwhile, Kovalensky was involved in questionable financial dealings. Faced with prosecution from charges of mishandling stock, Kovalensky committed suicide in April of 1883.

Kovalevskaya returned to her study of mathematics and through the efforts of a friend and fellow student of Weierstrass, Gosta Mittag-Leffler, Kovalevskaya was offered a position at Stockholm University as a privatdozent (a licensed lecturer who could receive payment from students but not from the university) in 1884. Five years later, Kovalevskaya became the first female mathematician to hold a chair at a European university. This appointment was accompanied by the editorship of the journal Acta Mathematica, where she came in contact with the leading European mathematicians of the day. In 1888, Kovalevskaya's paper on the study of the motion of a rigid body received the Prix Bordin, given by the French Académie Royale des Sciences.

Kovalevskaya died in 1891 of influenza when she was only 41 years old, at the height of her mathematical career. Although she published only ten papers during her lifetime, Kovalevskaya's work has withstood the test of time. The research that won her the Prix Bordin is now known as the Kovelevskaya top, and her doctoral dissertation on partial differential equations lives on as the Cauchy-Kovelevskaya Theorem.