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 Today is the birthday of Sofia (Krukovsky) Kovalevskaya, the Russian mathematician and writer who became the first woman in modern Europe to hold a university chair. Sofia Kovalevskaya was born on January 15, 1850 in Moscow. Her father, Vasily Vasilievich Krukovsky, was an artillery officer who later became a general and noble. Her mother, Elizaveta Fyodorovna Schubert, was the granddaughter of Theodor Schubert, a mathematician and astronomer.
As a child, Sofia lived at her family's country estate in a room whose walls were papered with her father's old calculus notes. "The meaning of the concepts I could not grasp," she later wrote, "but they acted on my imagination." With help from her uncle Pytor, Sophia convinced her father to provide her with a calculus tutor. The girl's kinship with her eccentric but didactic uncle also fostered her interest in algebra and triogonometry. When his daughter turned 15, Vasily Vasilievich Krukovsky ended her education and forbade her from studying abroad. Sofia Krukovsky's decision to marry Vladimir Kovalensky, a young paleontologist, provided a means of escape in an age when Russian women could not have their own passports.
In 1869, Sofia Kovalevskaya moved to Germany with her new husband. Although the University of Heidelberg did not admit women, Kovalevskaya successfully petitioned the faculty for permission to audit courses in mathematics. The professors who allowed her attendance were soon "ecstatic" about her abilities, as one student later wrote, and "spoke about her as an extraordinary phenomenon." In 1871, Kovalevskaya moved to Berlin to study with Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass, a professor whose interest in the soundness of calculus had earned him the title "father of modern analysis". Weierstrass's efforts to enroll Sofia at the University of Berlin failed, but he agreed to provide her with private instruction. By the spring of 1874, Sofia Kovalevskaya had completed dissertation-length papers about partial differential equations, Abelian integrals, and Saturn's rings. The Ph.D. in Mathematics that the University of Goettingen agreed to bestow on Kovalevskaya was the first such degree awarded to a woman.
Sofia Kovalevskaya returned to Russia with the hope of obtaining a professorship at St. Petersburg University, but was instead limited to teaching arithmetic to elementary-school girls. "I was", she later quipped, "unfortunately weak in the multiplication tables." After giving birth to a daughter in 1878, Kovalevskaya wrote novels, theatrical reviews, and scientific reports for newspapers. She also wrote several articles about the refraction of light and corresponded with Pafnuty Chebyshev, whose mathematical contributions include probability, statistics, and number theory. Although Sofia Kovalevskaya separated from her husband in 1881, she was deeply affected by his suicide two years later. Once again, she immersed herself in her work, this time earning a teaching position at the University of Stockholm. When her five-year "extraordinary professorship" ended in 1889, Sofia Kovalevskaya became the first woman since the physicist Laura Bassi and the mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi to hold a chair at a European university.
During her years at Stockholm, Kovalevskaya taught courses, edited a mathematical journal, and corresponded with mathematicians from across Europe. For her research, she won awards from both the French Academy of Sciences (1886) and the Swedish Academy of Sciences (1889). With the support of Chebyshev, Kovalevskaya was also elected to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in her native Russia. Although the Czarist government had refused to allow her to teach at St. Petersburg University, the rules at the Imperial Academy were changed to allow the election of a woman.
In early 1891, Sofia Kovalevskaya died of influenza complicated by pneumonia. She was 41 years old.
Resources:
http://www.agnesscott.edu/LRiddle/women/kova.htm
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kovalevskaya.html
http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_kovalevskaya.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Kovalevskaya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Weierstrass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pafnuty_Chebyshev
http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/whm2001/bassi.html
http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/WOMEN/agnesi.htm
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