Sofia Kovalevskaya
19th-century Russian mathematician · Sweden · Academics · Lived 1850 to 1891 · aged 41
Sofia Kovalevskaya is read about 464 times a day, in 79 languages.
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Something wrong?She walked into rooms built to keep her out. The first woman to hold a mathematics doctorate, the first to chair a university department in Europe, she solved problems in differential equations and mechanics that still anchor the field - not in spite of the locked doors, but by forcing them open.
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Born Sofya Vasilyevna Korvin-Krukovskaya on 15 January 1850 in Russia, she entered a world where academia was a masculine fortress and women were spectators at best. She became the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics in the modern sense, then the first appointed to a full professorship in Europe, and among the first to edit a scientific journal. Her contributions to analysis, partial differential equations, and mechanics produced at least two results of lasting scholarly value. Known as Sophie Kowalevski in her published work and Sonja in Sweden, she died on 10 February 1891. Historian of science Ann Hibner Koblitz called her "the greatest known woman scientist before the twentieth century." She achieved it all under the weight of scrutiny and expectation that she would fail.
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