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A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia - Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary (Lives of Women in Science)

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A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia: Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary
by Ann Hibner Koblitz

Sofia Kovalevskaia's life is a beacon for intellectuals. Her life covered an exciting time in European intellectual and social history across the second half of the nineteenth century. She was the leading female mathematician prior to the twentieth century. She was the first woman in modern times to receive her doctorate in mathematics; the first outside of late Renaissance Italy to hold a chair in mathematics - at Stockholm University; and first female editor of a mathematical journal - `Acta Mathematica'. She is remembered for the Cauchy - Kovalevskaia Theorem and wrote ten mathematical papers including one on the form of Saturn's rings.

In Russia of the 1860's Kovalevskaia belonged to a group of young Russian intellectuals referred to offensively as `nihilists'. In reply, many of the young people, far from being insulted by the term, embraced it for their own. They had almost boundless faith in the power of education to win out against superstition and backwardness; they were confident that woman's potential was fully equal to that of man; and they had a naive belief that natural sciences would, given free reign, conquer all of humanity's ills. Adopting a simple life-style, nihilist women conversed on an equal level with nihilist men with a voracious appetite for learning. They desired to be of use to the common people in some capacity even though opponents claimed they rejected everything and respected nothing in tsarist society.

Author Ann Koblitz relates Sofia Kovalevskaia's life (1850 - 1891) resulting from an early admiration for the natural sciences and mathematics, the urgent need for reform of the Russian system of government, and a belief that every right-thinking person should become educated, and to bring that education to the Russian peasantry. She tells the extremes to which Sofia had to go to counter the opposition to education for women.

Russian women had little possibility for higher education except private tutoring, cooperative learning, and study abroad. Study abroad often required a fictitious marriage so they could be accompanied to a German or Swiss university. Sofia Kovalevskaia's fictitious marriage to a young geologist in September 1868 at age 18, saw her study in St Petersberg and travel to Vienna in 1869, then Heidelberg and Berlin. There she successfully studied with Karl Weierstrass for four years including six weeks tending the wounded in the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1871, and was a disciple of Karl Weierstrass for the rest of her life. Weierstrass was the greatest mathematical analyst in the world - "the master of us all" according to French mathematician Charles Hermite.

Kovalevskaia was not a revolutionary activist but she was motivated by political considerations, committed to women's rights as a leader of the women's movement, and "a shining light toward which all eyes of young girls who wanted an education turned". Nevertheless her main intellectual activity, other than writing, was mathematics.

Kovalevskaia succeeded as a professional in a field, which until then had been entirely male. She was awarded the degree of doctor of philosophy at Göttingen in 1874 and a professorship at Stockolm University in 1884. She was thus one of history's few early female mathematicians along with Hypatia (375-415), Maria Agnesi (1718-1799), Émile du Châtelet (1706-1749), Sophie Germain (1766-1831), Mary Somerville (1780 - 1872) and Emmy Noether (1882-1935).

"A Convergence of Lives" accurately and thoughtfully relates Kovalevskaia's life as "a faithful and devoted ally of young Russia; a Russia peaceful, just, and free, the Russia to which belongs the future".

Malcolm Cameron
16 September 2011