Abstract
THE Swedish papers bring us the sad news of the death of the lady-Professor of Mathematics at the Stockholm University, Mme. Sophie Kovalevsky. She spent her Christmas holidays in the south of France, returned to Stockholm on February 4, and began her course of lectures on the 6th. On the evening of that day she felt ill, and on the 10th she died of an attack of pleurisy. She was born in 1853 at Moscow, and spent her early childhood in a small town of West Russia, where her father, the general of artillery Corvin-Krukowski, was staying at that time; and afterwards on her father's estate in the same part of Russia. She received her first instruction from her father, but it seems that it was her maternal uncle, an engineer of some renown, Schubert, who awakened in her an interest in natural science. She early lost both her mother and her father, and, having ardent sympathy with the movement which was spreading among Russian youth, she applied for, and at last obtained, permission to study at St. Petersburg. The next year—that is, in 1869, when she was but sixteen years old—she was received as a student at the Heidelberg University, and began the study of higher mathematics. About this time, when extremely young, she married Kovalevsky, the well-known Moscow Professor of Palæontology. From 1871 to 1874, she was again in Germany, this time at Berlin, studying mathematics under Weierstrass; and at the age of twenty-one, she received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Göttingen. Her husband died in 1883, and the next year, in June, she was offered the chair of higher mathematical analysis at the Stockholm Högskola, on condition that she should lecture during the first year in German, and afterwards in Swedish. This she did, and most successfully too—some of her Swedish pupils already being professors themselves. Her chief mathematical papers were: “On the Theory of Partial Differential Equations” (in Journal für Mathematik, 1874, vol. Ixxx.): “On the Reduction of a class of Abel's Integrals of the Third Degree into Elliptical Integrals” (in Acta Mathematica, 1884, vol. iv.)—both being connected with the researches of Weierstrass; “On the Transmission of Light in a Crystalline Medium” (first in the Swedish Förhandlingar, and next in the Comptes rendus, 1884, vol. xcviii.), being part of a larger work in which Mme. Kovalevsky shows the means of integrating some partial differential equations which play an important part in optics; and “On a Particular Case of the Problem of Rotation of a Heavy Body around a Fixed Point” (in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy: Savants étrangers, vol. xxxi., 1888). The third of these works received from the French Academy the Prix Baudin, which was doubled on account of the “quite extraordinary service” rendered to mathematical physics by this work of Sophie Kovalevsky. She was also elected a Corresponding Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
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K., P. Professor Sophie Kovalevsky. Nature 43, 375–376 (1891). https://doi.org/10.1038/043375a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/043375a0