Sofia Kovalévskaya

Sofía, name also translated as Sonia, was the first woman to get a place as a university professor in Europe . Since it was certainly not easy to obtain nor was it exempt from strong criticism.

However, he did possess the necessary skills. In addition to being a professor, Russian mathematics made significant contributions in the fields of analysis, differential equations or mechanics .

Sofía Kovalévskaya was born in Moscow (Russia) in 1850. Her grandfather had been the crown prince of the King of Hungary but lost his title by marrying a gypsy woman. He grew up in a cultural and scientific environment since his relatives shared a passion for learning. It is worth mentioning that her older sister is the revolutionary Russian feminist and socialist Anna Jaclard .

She was able to go study abroad after getting a passport upon marriage, and thus traveled to Germany to receive classes at the University of Heidelberg and later moved to Berlin to receive private classes from the well-known German mathematician Karl Weierstrass. The mathematician, seeing his potential, looked for a university in which they would accept a woman to do a doctorate, and thus he obtained it as a doctor summa cum laude at the University of Göttingen.. After comings and goings between Russia and Germany and the difficulty of practicing as a mathematician, Sofia finally ends up as a professor at the University of Stockholm, thanks to the help of colleagues like Gösta Mittag-Leffer and against the will of others. When everything seemed to settle, he fell ill with pneumonia at the age of forty-one in 1891, the year in which he died from this disease. Sofia Kovalévskaya