KOVALEVSKAYA, SOFYA (VASILYEVNA)

born Jan. 15, 1850, Moscow, Russia died Feb. 10, 1891, Stockholm, Swed. mathematician and novelist who made valuable contributions to the theory of differential equations. The daughter of an artillery general, she married a young paleontologist, Vladimir Kovalevsky, in 1868, and the two went to Germany to continue their studies. In 1869 she studied under the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz at the University of Heidelberg. Since public lectures were not open to women, she studied privately with the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass at Berlin between 1871 and 1874. The University of Gttingen granted her a degree in absentia in 1874 for a thesis on partial differential equations, one of her most remarkable works. In 1884 Kovalevskaya accepted an invitation to become lecturer at the University of Stockholm, where five years later she was appointed professor of higher mathematics. In 1888 she was awarded the Borodin Prize of the Academy of Sciences for a paper on the rotation of a solid body around a fixed point. So remarkable was this work that the value of the prize was doubled. She also gained a reputation as a novelist for such works as Vera Vorontzoff (1893), depicting her life in Russia.