Sofia Kovalevskaya

Sofia Kovalevskaya or Sofia Vasilievna Kovalevskaya (maiden name Korvin-Krukovskaya) or, as Sofia Casanova translates it, Zofja Kowalewska (Moscow, January 15, 1850 - Stockholm, February 10, 1891) (in Russian, Со́фья Ковале́вская) was a Russian mathematician and writer, of Romani ethnicity who made significant contributions in the fields of analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. Her name is sometimes transliterated as Sophie, Sonya, Sonja, or Sonia. Her last name Kovalévskaya is the feminine variant of the masculine Kovalevski .

Biographical information

Born and raised in a well-educated Russian gypsy family, Sofía was also a descendant of Matías Corvino, King of Hungary. Her grandfather, for marrying a gypsy woman and being related to that ethnic group, lost the hereditary title of prince. On her paternal side she was of Polish descent and among her ancestors she had the cartographer Friedrich Schubert and the astronomer Theodor von Schubert; on her mother's side she was Belarusian. She had a sister, the writer Anna Jaclard, and a brother, General Fyodor Vasilievich Korvin-Krukovsky (1855—1992).

Korvin-Krukovski House in Políbino, today S.Kovalévskaya Museum.

Since he was eight years old, he lived in Políbino (Vitebsk Governorate, today in Pskov Oblast), in a house with a dense cultural and scientific atmosphere. She loved reading and poetry since she was a child, and she came to successfully cultivate autobiography, novels and theater. She soon acquired a very independent thought, influenced by her older sister, the socialist Anna Jaclard; In addition, two of her uncles instilled in her a love of learning: one was a true lover of reading and an amateur mathematician; the other taught him science and biology.

Under the guidance of his brothers' tutor I.I. Malevich, Sofia began her first real studies in mathematics. At thirteen she began to show very good qualities for algebra. About this time he wrote: "I began to feel such an intense attraction to mathematics that I began to neglect my other studies." daughter's math. Even so, Sofia continued studying algebra books on her own and she borrowed a copy of Louis Bourdon's Algebra that she read at night when the rest of the family slept. Thus, what she had never studied was deducing little by little. A year later, a neighbor, Professor Tyrtov, presented Sofia's family with a book he was the author of, and she Sofia tried to read it. She did not understand the trigonometric formulas and tried to explain them to herself.

From the knowledge she already had, Sofia explained and analyzed for herself what the trigonometric concept of sine was, as it was originally developed. A teacher discovered Sofia's faculties, and spoke with her father to recommend that she facilitate her daughter's studies. After several years, her father agreed, and Sofia began taking private lessons.

The years of her adolescence were years of rebellion, the time of the great revolutions and demonstrations of the 19th century in which feminist socialism was losing ground. Her maiden name was Korvin-Krukovskaya, and she was a descendant of a King of Hungary. At eleven years old, she fell in love with the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who came to court her sister. Later, when she married at 18, she adopted the last name of her husband.

PhD and chair

In order to pursue scientific studies abroad, since Russia did not give passports to unmarried women, nor did it allow a woman to live apart from her family, Kovalévskaya agreed to a marriage of convenience at the age of 18 with the evolutionary paleontologist who was Nihilist like her, Vladimir Kovalevski (brother of the biologist Aleksandr Kovalevski); together they traveled to Vienna. And she enrolled in the University of Heidelberg in 1869 and followed the courses of Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz and Leo Königsberger there. These professors advised her to go to Berlin to receive classes from Karl Weierstraß or Weierstrass, but privately, the same ones that he taught at the university, since it did not allow the training of women. Karl Weierstraß did it with pleasure, as she was one of his best disciples. At the same time that she was studying, she was starting her doctoral work. But when the Paris Commune (1871) broke out, Sofia marched there with her husband and her sister Anna, supporting her and her husband in the revolution from April to May 1871, although not actively: she worked in a hospital. Returning to Berlin, she began research on three theses in November 1872: two memoirs on mathematics and one on astronomy. The first was about equations with partial derivatives, in which she managed to correct and improve a Cauchy result (stating and proving what is now called the Cauchy-Kovalévskaya Theorem). The second was a study of Abelian integrals, and the third explained the shape of Saturn's rings. For these three memoirs, she obtained the title of doctor summa cum laude at the University of Göttingen in 1874, being the first woman to obtain this title not only in Germany, but in the world (although Maria Gaetana Agnesi already he had obtained one in Bologna in the 18th century). Weierstrass had found him a university that would accept a doctorate for a woman, even though, as he said, each of these three works would have been enough by itself to do a doctoral thesis; she got it on the condition that she did not pass the oral exam, that is, she Sofía she received her doctorate in absentia. With her husband Vladimir Kovalevski, paleontologist and translator of Charles Darwin into Russian, Sofia went to England, where she met novelist George Eliot and evolutionary philosopher Herbert Spencer.

Sofia Kovalévskaya in 1880.

They then returned to Russia, but she found no way to practice her math trade or have her title validated; In addition, real estate speculation practically ruined the couple, who then went through great economic hardships, aggravated by the birth of a daughter, Sofía (Fufa), on October 17, 1878. After a few years of interruption, he returned to mathematics in 1880, although her husband underestimated her scientific qualities; he translated her dissertation into Russian and presented it to a congress that same year. To escape creditors they moved to Moscow, where she regularly attended the events of the Moscow Mathematical Society. She was once again so fascinated by mathematics that she decided to travel to Berlin for two months to catch up and connect with recent research. As she could no longer help him, she left her husband, who had now become entangled in another ruinous oil business, in March 1881, and at the end of the year she moved to Paris with her little daughter. In 1882, she had already met the most important French mathematicians and, in July, she was accepted into the Paris Mathematical Society. Her husband committed suicide under horrible conditions (by ingesting formaldehyde) in April 1883. And at the end of that year he traveled to Stockholm.

Thanks to Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Sofia was able to work on a trial basis for a year at Stockholm University in 1884 as a Privatdozent. The decision did not please the machos at all: in August 1884 the playwright August Strindberg wrote the following in a newspaper:

That a woman is a math teacher is a harmful and unpleasant phenomenon, in fact, and could even be called monstrous. The invitation of this woman to Sweden, when male teachers far exceed their knowledge, can only be explained by the courtesy that Swedish women have towards the female sex..

Although she began teaching in German, within six months she had already learned Swedish. During this time, Sofía wrote the most important of her works, which provided a new solution to one of the problems that had most troubled famous mathematicians: the rotation of a solid body around a fixed point, a problem so difficult that the Academy of Sciences in Berlin had proposed a prize around 1850 without obtaining any results. Euler's and Lagrange's solutions were known, but Kovalevskaya found the third and last remaining case in which the equations could be solved, and she solved them. And for her innovative and original work on this subject she won the Bordin Prize of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1888), and that of the Stockholm Academy of Sciences the following year. She was also given a permanent teaching position at Stockholm University, thus becoming one of the first women university professors in Europe. In addition, she actively participated in the writing of the magazine Acta Mathematica , founded by Mittag-Leffler.

Literary work

It is often overlooked that she was also a writer. She is owed a few Recollections of My Childhood, printed with great success in 1889; some theatrical pieces (in collaboration with Anne Charlotte Leffler) and a partially autobiographical novel, Una nihilista (1899), which was translated into Spanish by the Slavic Sofía Casanova in 1909.

Private life

While studying in Heildelberg, she helped other women leave Russia and land in the old university town on the banks of the Neckar: her friend Julia Lermontova, who was her country's first PhD in chemistry; her cousin, the jurist Anna Yevreinova.

Kovalévskaya kept her lesbianism a secret, although she had a romantic relationship with the writer Anne Charlotte Leffler, sister of the mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, whom she met while they were students in Berlin. In the last years of her life, she also established a relationship with his cousin, the sociologist Maksim Kovalevsky.

She died of pneumonia at the early age of forty-one, on February 10, 1891. She is buried in the North Stockholm Cemetery.

Legacy

His works include "On the theory of differential equations", which appeared in the Crelle Magazine, and "On the rotation of a solid body around a fixed point". The homonymous story from the book Too Much Happiness, by the Nobel Prize for Literature Alice Munro, is inspired by the life of Kovalévskaya.

Honors

• The “Sofia Kovalevsky” day on mathematics, in United States secondary schools, is a program of the Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM), which promotes the financing of workshops in the United States to encourage girls to explore mathematics.
• The Sofia Kovalevsky Conference is sponsored annually by the AWM, and aims to highlight the significant contributions of women in the fields of applied or computer mathematics. Among the award winners are: Irene Fonseca (2006), Ingrid Daubechies (2005), Joyce R. McLaughlin (2004) and Linda R. Petzold (2003).
• The lunar crater Kovalevskaya received his name in his honor, as did the asteroid (1859) Kovalevskaya.
• The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany biannually awards the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award to promising young researchers from all fields.