When was sonya kovalevsky born

While at home, Sofia neglected her work in mathematics but instead developed her literary skills. She tried her hand at fiction, theater reviews, and science articles for a newspaper Rappaport In , Sofia returned to her work in mathematics with a new fervor. She presented a paper on Abelian integrals at a scientific conference and was very well received. Once again she was faced with the dilemma of finding employment doing what she loved most--mathematics.

She decided to return to Berlin, also home to Weierstrass. She was not there long before she learned of Vladimir's death. He had committed suicide when all of his business ventures had collapsed. Sofia's grief threw her into her work more passionately than ever Perl Then, in , Sofia's luck took a turn for the better. She received an invitation from an acquaintance and former student of Weierstrass, Gosta Mittag-Leffler, to lecture at the University of Stockholm.

In the beginning it was only a temporary position, but at the end of a five year period, Sofia had more than proven her value to the university.

Then came a series of great accomplishments. She gained a tenured position at the university, was appointed an editor for a mathematics journal, published her first paper on crystals, and in , was also appointed Chair of Mechanics.

In , Sofia again received devastating news. The death of her sister, Anya, was particularly hard on Sofia because the two had always been very close. Fortunately, it was not long afterward that Sofia achieved "her greatest personal triumph" Perl In her paper, Sofia developed the theory for an unsymmetrical body where the center of its mass is not on an axis in the body.

The paper was so highly regarded that the prize money was increased from to francs. Also at this time, a new man entered her life. Maxim Kovalevsky came to Stockholm for a series of lectures. Sonia Kovalevsky Sofia Kovalevskaya was the first major Russian female mathematician and the first woman appointed to full professorship in Northern Europe.

She was born in Moscow in She displayed an aptitude for mathematics from a very young age; but her father discourage her because he believed that there was no need for educated women and put a stop to further mathematical instruction when she turned thirteen. She went on to become a respected figure in the European scientific community, lecturing in Stockholm, editing a new journal, organizing international conferences and winning prizes from the French and Swedish Academies of Science for her important work on the study of rigid bodies.

She died of influenza in , at the peak of her career, in which she published ten papers in mathematics and mathematical physics and also several literary works. Math Advising. Mathematics Education. Elizaveta had been born on 15 December , and was about twenty years younger than her husband. Let us note at this point that sources differ in giving Vasily Korvin-Krukovsky's year of birth, with dates ranging between and It is also worth noting that Elizaveta Shubert's grandfather was the astronomer and cartographer Theodor Friedrich Schubert - who has a crater on Mercury named after him.

Fyodor went on to study in the Physics-Mathematics Faculty of St Petersburg University and then worked in a government ministry. We need to also say a little about Sofia Kovalevskaya's name. She was given the name Sofia Vasilievna Krukovsky, only adopting the name Korvin-Krukovsky after her father's application for nobility was accepted in She is often called Sophie or Sonya, the first being an anglicised version of Sofia, the second being a familiar version by which she was known by her friends after she became an adult.

Kovalevskaya is the female version of her husband's name Kovalevsky which is often transliterated as Kovalevskaia, and infrequently as Kovalevskaja. She is also known as Sonya Kovalevsky, using a masculine version of her surname, a form she sometimes used herself. We will use the form Sofia Kovalevskaya throughout this biography. In Sofia's father, General Krukovsky, was posted to Kaluga, about 70 km south west of Moscow, and the family lived there until The family had a nanny and a governess for Anyuta who was twelve years old when they moved to Kaluga.

Sofia lived at Palibino, the Krukovsky country estate, from when he father retired, and was educated by tutors and governesses. Palibino was near the Lithuanian border and was a large estate with sheep and cattle, lakes stocked with fish, forests with game, and vegetable gardens.

Sofia's father was fully occupied managing the estate and the family lived comfortably in the manor house. It was at a very young age that Sofia was attracted to mathematics. Her uncle Pyotr Vasilievich Krukovsky, her father's elder brother, often visited Palabino. She writes about him in [ 62 ] :- Although he was the oldest member of our family and should have been its head, the truth was that he was ordered about by anyone who felt like it, and the whole family treated him like an elderly child.

He had long held the reputation of an eccentric and a dreamer. His wife had died some years before; he had handed over his entire and rather good-sized estate to his only son, leaving for himself only a very small monthly pension.

Left thus without any definite business affairs to attend to, he used to come to Palibino often and stayed with us for weeks on end. His arrival was always regarded as a holiday, and the atmosphere at home became somehow livelier and cosier when he was with us. Uncle Pyotr Vasilievich had a great respect for mathematics and often spoke about the subject.

Sofia wrote in her autobiography [ 62 ] :- The meaning of these concepts I naturally could not yet grasp, but they acted on my imagination, instilling in me a reverence for mathematics as an exalted and mysterious science which opens up to its initiates a new world of wonders, inaccessible to ordinary mortals. When Sofia was 11 years old, the walls of her nursery were papered with pages of Ostrogradski 's lecture notes on differential and integral analysis.

This requires some explanation! Before the family moved from Kaluga to Palibino, they had the whole manor house redecorated. Wallpaper was ordered from St Petersburg but they had made a small error in working out how many rolls would be required and ended up one short.

Rather than order one roll, they decided to paper the nursery with old sheets of paper and looked for some in their attic. Ostrogradski 's lecture notes on differential and integral analysis were there because Vasily Vasilievich, Sofia's father, had attended his course when undergoing his military training. She noticed that there were certain things on the sheets she had heard mentioned by her uncle.

Studying the wallpaper was Sofia's introduction to calculus. It was under the family's tutor, Yosif Ignatievich Malevich - , that Sofia undertook her first proper study of mathematics, beginning with arithmetic which she found boring and then moving on to elementary geometry and algebra. She writes that it was as his pupil that [ 62 ] :- I began to feel an attraction for my mathematics so intense that I started to neglect my other studies. Sofia's father decided to put a stop to her mathematics lessons but she borrowed a copy of Bourdon's Algebra Course which she read at night when the rest of the household was asleep [ 62 ] :- Since I was under my governess's strict surveillance all day long, I was forced to practice some cunning in this matter.

At bedtime I used to put the book under my pillow and then, when everyone was asleep, I would read the night through under the dim light of the icon-lamp or the night lamp.

Under such circumstances, of course, I did not dare dream of continuing the systematic study of my favourite subject.

My mathematical knowledge would likely have remained confined for a long time, to the contents of Bourdon's 'Algebra' if I had not been aided by the following incident, which motivated my father to reassess his views on my education to some degree.

The incident she refers to happened a year later when a neighbour, Nikolai Tyrtov, Professor of Physics at the Naval Academy, presented her family with a physics textbook which he had written, and Sofia attempted to read it. She did not understand the trigonometric formulae that she came across in the chapter on optics and attempted to explain them herself. Tyrtov realised that in her working with the concept of sine, she had used the same method by which it had been developed historically.

Tyrtov argued with Sofia's father that she should be encouraged to study mathematics further but it was two years later before he permitted Sofia to take private lessons with Aleksandr Strannoliubskii - who had been a student of Tyrtov. These lessons on analytic geometry, and differential and integral calculus, took place when the family were in St Petersburg, where they spent some time each year visiting the Shubert aunts.

There Sofia joined her family's social circle which included the author Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. We now need to say a little about Sofia's sister Anyuta at this point, because she was a strong influence on the young Sofia.

In around Anyuta had become enthusiastic about the radical ideas that one of her friends, the son of the local priest, told her about when he was home in Palibino from his university studies during the vacation. Anyuta wanted to go to St Petersburg to live, and even proposed living in a commune where young people were living together without servants. Her father was not going to allow such behaviour and Anyuta had to remain at Palibino. She reacted by secretly writing and getting two pieces published under a male pseudonym.