Sofia Kovalevskaya Essay

Sofia Kovalevskaya (also known as Sonia Kovalevsky) was not only a great mathematician, but also a writer and advocate of women's rights in the 19th century. She tried to get the best education available which began to open doors at universities to women. She was a part of ground-breaking work in mathematics made her male counterparts reconsider her as an important person in mathematics and that women could be a part of their world. Sofia Krukovsky Kovalevskaya was born in 1850. She was child of a Russian family of minor nobility, Sofia was raised in nice surroundings. She was not a happy child. She felt left out of her family - where her older sister and younger brother were treated better than her. She had a lot of other people who

The death of her sister, Anya, was particularly hard on Sofia because the two had always been very close. In 1888, she entered her paper, "On the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point," in a competition for the Prix Bordin by the French Academy of Science and won. "Prior to Sofya Kovalevsky's [Sofia Kovalevskaya] work the only solutions to the motion of a rigid body about a fixed point had been developed for the two cases where the body is symmetric". At this time, a new man entered her life. Maxim Kovalevsky came to Stockholm for a series of lectures. They did not marry because both of them were so busy with their mathematics and work. In the fall of 1889, she returned to Stockholm. She was still miserable at the loss of Maxim even though she frequently traveled to France to visit him. She eventually became ill with depression and pneumonia. On February 10, 1891, Sofia Kovalevskaya died and the scientific world mourned her loss. During her career she published ten papers in mathematics and mathematical physics and also several literary works. Many of these scientific papers were ground-breaking theories or the impetus for future discoveries. There is no question that Sofia Krukovsky Kovalevskaya was an incredible