Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) was one of the first modern women to receive a doctorate in mathematics and passed on her groundbreaking work through teaching.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today, we’re talking about a STEMinist who traveled Europe to make a place for women in the world of mathematics. She was one of the first modern women to receive a doctorate in mathematics and passed on her groundbreaking work through teaching. She was also a minor player in several intellectual movements, including the Russian nihilists and the Paris Commune. Let’s talk about Sofya Kovalevskaya.
Sofya was born Sofya Krukovsky on January 15, 1850, in Moscow, Russia. She was the second of three children born to a Lieutenant-General of the Imperial Russian Army and a German mother. Though Sofya would later characterize her childhood as fairly lonely, she was her father’s favorite child and was close to her sister, Anna, her entire life.
When Sofya was eight, her father arranged for a private tutor for Sofya and her sister. This was fairly unusual for the time, since most girls of Sofya’s social class merely learned to paint or sew, if anything. Sofya, though, quickly became proficient in another subject: math.
Sofya claims to have had her start in mathematics by studying her bedroom’s walls-- in lieu of wallpaper, her room was covered in her father’s old calculus notes from school. Sofya had a natural gift for the subject. She was guided by her uncle’s lessons in sophisticated theorems and taught herself trigonometry at the age of 14. A family neighbor and fellow physicist was so impressed by her abilities that he convinced Sofya’s father to allow her to attend secondary school in St. Petersburg.
Math wasn’t the only subject to grab Sofya’s attention -- she and her sister, Anna, also developed a keen interest in politics. She and her sister also began a friendship with writer Dostoevsky. It eventually turned into a marriage proposal from the famed author to Anna, who turned him down.
In the 1860s, the sisters became involved in the Russian nihilist movement. The movement’s ideology centered around the belief that science was capable of solving Russia’s social ills. One of the new concepts the nihilists popularized were so-called “fictitious” marriages. In these agreements, couples got married on a platonic basis with the goal of liberating the woman from her parents’ home.
That kind of freedom was just what Sofya was looking for: due to restrictions on women’s education in Russia, she couldn’t study within the country, and her father prevented her from going abroad. So, when Vladimir Kovalevsky presented himself as a willing candidate in 1868, the couple was wed within the year. She was 18, and he was 26. They stayed in Russia a bit longer, during which time Sofya petitioned unsuccessfully for women’s education rights.
Once it became clear neither Kovalevsky could further their careers in Russia, the couple left for Berlin. There, Sofya spent three semesters at the University of Heidelberg studying physics, physiology, and mathematics. The couple also traveled during this time, meeting the likes of Charles Darwin and George Eliot. They spent a brief, hectic moment in Paris in 1871, when they heard Anna and her new lover had been taken prisoner in the disbandment of the Paris Commune. Eventually, thanks to Vladimir’s help and aid from Sofya’s father, Anna and her lover were saved from execution and set free.
In Berlin, Sofya became the student of Professor Karl Weierstrass. Though he initially did not believe in teaching women, he was impressed by Sofya’s ability to complete the complicated equations he gave her upon their first meeting. During her time with him, Sofya wrote three papers worthy of a dissertation. She eventually presented one on partial differential equations. It contained a simplification to an equation on the conduction of heat that now bears her name: the Cauchy-Kovalevsky Theorem.
With that paper, Sofya earned a Ph. D. from the University of Göttingen and became the first modern woman to obtain a doctorate degree in mathematics.
After getting her degree, Sofya and Vladimir moved back to Russia for five turbulent years. By that point, their marriage had become shaky -- the partners seemingly had different feelings on how platonic the relationship should be and they made several ill-fated financial investments.
Plus, once again, Sofya’s career goals had stalled as women were barred from getting the necessary degree to teach in Russia. Instead, she raised money for a women’s higher education institute that opened in 1878, and began to write for scientific journals. She also gave birth to her daughter, also named Sofya, or “FuFu” for short.
But Sofya wasn’t satisfied, and in 1880 she left for Berlin alone. In the subsequent years, her life changed dramatically: in 1881, she and Vladimir broke up and Fufu came to live with her in Berlin. Just two years later, Vladimir committed suicide. Sofya fell into a deep depression and returned to Russia to straighten out his affairs.
That same year, Sofya got the news she had been waiting for: she was finally offered a teaching position, at the University of Stockholm. When she accepted, it made her the first modern woman to receive a teaching position at a European university. She taught her first lecture on partial differential equations, the same subject that had earned her historic Ph. D.
But even after getting a teaching position, life was far from perfect. For starters, Sofya didn’t get paid for teaching-- instead, she lived off of student contributions. She also disliked life in Sweden, and for five years, she split her time between Sweden, Paris, Russia, and Berlin. In 1886, she suffered another personal loss when her sister, Anna, died.
Still, Sofya kept working on new projects. During her time in Stockholm, she took on her biggest project yet: studying the rotation of a solid body around a fixed point. She also edited the well-known journal Act Mathematica, and finally was appointed first assistant professor, and ultimately a permanent professor at the University of Stockholm.
Sofya garnered quite a bit of attention for her work, once again making history for women in the field of mathematics. In 1888, she was awarded the Prix Borodin from the Academy of Paris, a first for women. She also became the first woman elected as a corresponding member to the Russian Academy of Sciences, a position she had aspired to her entire life.
Sofya also found some success in her personal life. She fell in love with a man named Maxim Kovalevsky, a distant relative of her late husband. But when Maxim wanted to marry her, Sofya refused. She knew her constant traveling and busy work life would not allow her to settle down with him.
As in her early years, Sofya’s interests extended beyond mathematics. She wrote non-scientific books, and she collaborated on a play and wrote a memoir about her childhood while she stayed with Anna in her sister’s final years. She also returned to her roots and began work on a novel about a nihilist girl in St. Petersburg in the 1870s.
She never finished it. Sofya died in 1891 of complications from pneumonia after a few months of declining health. She was 41 years old.
Though she died at a young age, and at the height of her career and investigations, Sofya Kovalevskaya broke barriers for women in math during her relatively short career. Since 2002, one of the most valuable scientific awards in Germany bears her name.
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Talk to you tomorrow!