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Monday, March 18, 2002

Sofia Kovalevskaya was born in 1850 in Moscow to an aristocratic family. She was neglected by her parents and raised by a strict governess.

Because of a shortage of wallpaper, the walls of Kovalevskaya's nursery were covered with her father's old calculus notes, which she studied. A formal study of mathematics under the instruction of the family tutor lasted a short while before her father stopped it. However, she did not let her father's disapproval end her studies; instead, she borrowed a copy of "Bourdeu's Algebra" that she read at night.

A year later, a neighbor gave her family a physics textbook. Kovalevskaya read it and taught herself the trigonometric formulas. The neighbor persuaded her father to permit her to take private lessons.

At 18, Kovalevskaya wanted to study at a university but her father wouldn't permit it. To overcome this difficulty, she entered a marriage of convenience with Vladimir Kovalevski, a young paleontologist. Although their marriage was plagued with quarrels, she had the freedom to study and travel.

In 1870, Kovalevskaya studied under the tutelage of Karl Weierstrass, a renowned mathematician, at the University of Berlin. Because the university did not accept women, she studied privately with Weierstrass for four years and produced three papers in the hopes of receiving a degree. In 1874, Kovalevskaya received her doctorate.

She later received a five-year professorship at the University of Stockholm and eventually became one of the first women to hold a chair at a European university. In 1886, Kovalevskaya's paper on the rotation of a body around a fixed point won the Prix Bordin. As a result, a crater on the moon was named in her honor.

-- By Jennifer Cramer, intern, Henry Buhl Jr. Planetarium & Observatory