Sofia Vasilyevna Korvin-Krukovsky (1850 - 1891)

Born 15 Jan 1850 in Moscow, Moscow Uyezd, Moscow, Russian Empire

Died 10 Feb 1891 at age 41 in Stockholm, Sweden

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Biography

Sofia Korvin-Krukovsky is Notable.

Sofia was born about 1850. She passed away about 1891. She was a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was a pioneer for women in mathematics around the world – the first woman to obtain a doctorate (in the modern sense) in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor.

Through great efforts, she obtained permission to audit classes with the professors' approval at the University of Heidelberg. There she attended courses in physics and mathematics under such teachers as Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen.

In Berlin, she began to take private lessons with Karl Weierstrass, since the university would not allow her even to audit classes. He was very impressed with her mathematical skills, and over the subsequent three years taught her the same material that comprised his lectures at the university.

Kovalevskaya had left her daughter in Moscow and only saw her during the summer of 1884, but in 1885, when Fufa was eight years old, she brought her to Stockholm. In June 1889 she became the first woman since the physicist Laura Bassi and Maria Gaetana Agnesi to hold a chair at a European university.

The topic of the Prix Bordin of the French Academy of Sciences was announced in 1886. Entries were to be significant contributions to the problem of the study of a rigid body. Kovalevskaya entered and, in 1886, was awarded the Prix Bordin for her paper Mémoire sur un cas particulier du problème de le rotation d'un corps pesant autour d'un point fixe, où l'intégration s'effectue à l'aide des fonctions ultraelliptiques du temps.
Kovalevskaya's further research on this subject won a prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1889, and in the same year, on the initiative of Chebyshev, Kovalevskaya was elected a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

In early 1891, at the height of her mathematical powers and reputation, Kovalevskaya died of influenza complicated by pneumonia. She had travelled to France and had fallen ill shortly after returning to Stockholm. The doctors made an incorrect diagnosis of her illness and by the time they realised she was suffering from pneumonia, it was too late to save her. She was buried in the Northern Cemetery of Solna, just to the north of Stockholm.

Sources

• https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21212708/sofia-vasilyevna-kovalevskaya
• Wikipedia: Sofya Kovalevskaya
• Wikidata: Item Q184535, en:Wikipedia
• https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kovalevskaya/