Kovalevskaia, Sofya Vasilevna (1850-1891)

Russian mathematician and novelist who worked on partial differential equations and Abelian integrals. In 1886 she won the Prix Bordin of the French Academy of Sciences for a paper on the rotation of a rigid body about a point, a problem the 18th-century mathematicians Euler and Lagrange had both failed to solve.

She was born in Moscow and studied in Germany at Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen. Excluded from most European academic posts because of her sex, she finally obtained a lectureship in Sweden and became professor at Stockholm in 1889. In addition to her mathematical work, she wrote plays and novels, including Vera Brantzova (1895).