Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (; born Korvin-Krukovskaya; – 10 February 1891) was a Russian
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
who made noteworthy contributions to
analysis
Analysis (: analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...
,
partial differential equation
In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which involves a multivariable function and one or more of its partial derivatives.
The function is often thought of as an "unknown" that solves the equation, similar to ho ...
s and
mechanics
Mechanics () is the area of physics concerned with the relationships between force, matter, and motion among Physical object, physical objects. Forces applied to objects may result in Displacement (vector), displacements, which are changes of ...
. She was a pioneer for
women in mathematics
This is a timeline of women in mathematics.
Timeline
Classical Age
* Before 350: Pandrosion, a Greeks, Greek mathematician known for an approximate solution to doubling the cube and a simplified exact solution to the construction of the geometr ...
around the world – the
first woman to earn a doctorate (in the modern sense) in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor. According to historian of science
Ann Hibner Koblitz
Ann Hibner Koblitz (born 1952) is a Professor Emerita of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University known for her studies of the history of women in science. She is the Director of the Kovalevskaia Fund, which supports women in scienc ...
, Kovalevskaya was "the greatest known woman scientist before the twentieth century".
Historian of mathematics Roger Cooke writes:
Her sister was the socialist
Anne Jaclard.
There are several alternative
transliterations of her name. She herself used Sophie Kowalevski (or occasionally Kowalevsky) in her academic publications. In Sweden she was known as Sonja Kovalevsky; Sonja (Russian ) is her Russian nickname.
Background and early education
Sofya Kovalevskaya (''
née
The birth name is the name of the person given upon their birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name or to the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a births registe ...
'' Korvin-Krukovskaya) was born in Moscow, the second of three children. Her father, Lieutenant General , served in the
Imperial Russian Army
The Imperial Russian Army () was the army of the Russian Empire, active from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was organized into a standing army and a state militia. The standing army consisted of Regular army, regular troops and ...
as head of the Moscow Artillery before retiring to
Polibino, his family estate in
Pskov Oblast
Pskov Oblast () is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia (an oblast), located in the west of the country. Its administrative center is the Classification of inhabited localities in Russia, city of Pskov. As of the Russian Census ...
in 1858, when Kovalevskaya was eight years old. He was a member of the minor
Russian nobility
The Russian nobility or ''dvoryanstvo'' () arose in the Middle Ages. In 1914, it consisted of approximately 1,900,000 members, out of a total population of 138,200,000. Up until the February Revolution of 1917, the Russian noble estates staffed ...
, of mixed Belarussian–
Polish descent (Polish on his father's side), with possible partial ancestry from the
royal Corvin family of Hungary, and served as Marshall of Nobility for Vitebsk province. (There may also have been some
Romani ancestry on the father's side.)
Her mother, Yelizaveta Fedorovna von Schubert (1820–1879), descended from a family of
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany, the country of the Germans and German things
**Germania (Roman era)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
immigrants to
St. Petersburg who lived on
Vasilievsky Island
Vasilyevsky Island (, Vasilyevsky Ostrov, V.O.) is an island in St. Petersburg, Russia, bordered by the Bolshaya Neva and Malaya Neva Rivers (in the delta of the Neva River) in the south and northeast, and by Neva Bay of the Gulf of Finl ...
. Her maternal great-grandfather was the astronomer and geographer
Friedrich Theodor von Schubert (1758–1825), who emigrated to Russia from Germany around 1785. He became a full member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Science and head of its astronomical observatory. His son, Kovalevskaya's maternal grandfather, was General
Theodor Friedrich von Schubert (1789–1865), who was head of the military topographic service, and an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as Director of the
Kunstkamera
The Kunstkamera (, derived from German ''Kunstkammer'' lit. "art chamber") formally organized as the Russian Academy of Science's Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (, ''Muzey antropologii i etnografii imeni Petra Velikogo R ...
museum.
Kovalevskaya's parents provided her with a good early education. At various times, her governesses were native speakers of English, French, and German. When she was 11 years old, she was intrigued by a foretaste of what she was to learn later in her lessons in calculus; the wall of her room had been papered with pages from lecture notes by
Ostrogradsky, left over from her father's student days. She was tutored privately in elementary mathematics by Iosif Ignatevich Malevich.
The physicist Nikolai Nikanorovich Tyrtov noted her unusual aptitude when she managed to understand his textbook by discovering for herself an approximate construction of trigonometric functions which she had not yet encountered in her studies. Tyrtov called her a "new
Pascal" and suggested she be given a chance to pursue further studies under the tutelage of . In 1866–67 she spent much of the winter with her family in St. Petersburg, where she was provided private tutoring by Strannoliubskii, a well-known advocate of higher education for women, who taught her calculus. During that same period, the son of a local priest introduced her
sister Anna to progressive ideas influenced by the radical movement of the 1860s, providing her with copies of radical journals of the time discussing
Russian nihilism.
Although the word ''nihilist'' (нигилист) often was used in a negative sense, it did not have that meaning for the young Russians of the 1860s (шестидесятники):
Despite her obvious talent for mathematics, she could not complete her education in Russia. At that time, women were not allowed to attend universities in Russia and most other countries. In order to study abroad, Kovalevskaya needed written permission from her father (or husband). Accordingly, in 1868 she contracted a "fictitious marriage" with
Vladimir Kovalevskij, a young paleontology student, book publisher and radical, who was the first to translate and publish the works of
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English Natural history#Before 1900, naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all speci ...
in Russia. They moved from Russia to Germany in 1869, after a brief stay in
Vienna
Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...
, in order to pursue advanced studies.
[Roger Cooke, ''The Mathematics of Sonya Kovalevskaya'', Springer-Verlag, 1984.]
Student years

In April 1869, following Sofia's and Vladimir's brief stay in Vienna, where she attended lectures in physics at the university, they moved to
Heidelberg
Heidelberg (; ; ) is the List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, fifth-largest city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, and with a population of about 163,000, of which roughly a quarter consists of studen ...
. Through great efforts, she obtained permission to audit classes with the professors' approval at the
University of Heidelberg
Heidelberg University, officially the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg (; ), is a public university, public research university in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1386 on instruction of Pope Urban VI, Heidelberg is List ...
. There she attended courses in physics and mathematics under such teachers as
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (; ; 31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894; "von" since 1883) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The ...
,
Gustav Kirchhoff
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (; 12 March 1824 – 17 October 1887) was a German chemist, mathematician, physicist, and spectroscopist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy and the emission of black-body ...
and
Robert Bunsen
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (;
30 March 1811
– 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. The Bu ...
.
Vladimir, meanwhile, went on to the University of Jena to pursue a doctorate in paleontology.
In October 1869, shortly after attending courses in Heidelberg, she visited London with Vladimir, who spent time with his colleagues
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist who specialized in comparative anatomy. He has become known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
The stor ...
and
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English Natural history#Before 1900, naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all speci ...
, while she was invited to attend
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrot ...
's Sunday salons.
There, at age nineteen, she met
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in '' ...
and was led into a debate, at Eliot's instigation, on "woman's capacity for abstract thought". Although there is no record of the details of their conversation, she had just completed a lecture course in Heidelberg on mechanics, and she may just possibly have made mention of the Euler equations governing the motion of a rigid body (see following section). George Eliot was writing ''
Middlemarch
''Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life'' is a novel by English author George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It appeared in eight installments (volumes) in 1871 and 1872. Set in Middlemarch, a fictional English Midlands town, in 1829 ...
'' at the time, in which one finds the remarkable sentence: "In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could hardly be less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid." This was well before Kovalevskaya's notable contribution of the "
Kovalevskaya top" to the brief list of known examples of integrable rigid body motion (see following section).
In October 1870, Kovalevskaya moved to Berlin, where she began to take private lessons with
Karl Weierstrass
Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass (; ; 31 October 1815 – 19 February 1897) was a German mathematician often cited as the " father of modern analysis". Despite leaving university without a degree, he studied mathematics and trained as a school t ...
, since the university would not allow her even to audit classes. He was very impressed with her mathematical skills, and over the subsequent three years taught her the same material that comprised his lectures at the university.
In 1871 she briefly traveled to Paris together with Vladimir in order to help in the
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune (, ) was a French revolutionary government that seized power in Paris on 18 March 1871 and controlled parts of the city until 28 May 1871. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French National Guard (France), Nation ...
, where Kovalevskaya attended the injured and her sister Anyuta was active in the Commune.
With the fall of the Commune, however, both Anyuta and her common law husband
Victor Jaclard, who was leader of the Montmartre contingent of the National Guard and a prominent Blanquiste, were arrested. Although Anyuta managed to escape to London, Jaclard was sentenced to execution. However, with the assistance of Sofia's and Anyuta's father General Krukovsky, who had come urgently to Paris to help Anyuta and who wrote to
Adolphe Thiers
Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers ( ; ; 15 April 17973 September 1877) was a French statesman and historian who served as President of France from 1871 to 1873. He was the second elected president and the first of the Third French Republic.
Thi ...
asking for clemency, Jaclard was saved.
Kovalevskaya returned to Berlin and continued her studies with Weierstrass for three more years. In 1874 she presented three papers—on
partial differential equation
In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which involves a multivariable function and one or more of its partial derivatives.
The function is often thought of as an "unknown" that solves the equation, similar to ho ...
s, on the dynamics of
Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 tim ...
's
rings, and on
elliptic integral
In integral calculus, an elliptic integral is one of a number of related functions defined as the value of certain integrals, which were first studied by Giulio Fagnano and Leonhard Euler (). Their name originates from their originally arising i ...
s—to the
University of Göttingen
The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen (, commonly referred to as Georgia Augusta), is a Public university, public research university in the city of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1734 ...
as her doctoral dissertation. With the support of Weierstrass, this earned her a doctorate in mathematics ''summa cum laude'', after Weierstrass succeeded in having her exempted from the usual oral examinations.
Kovalevskaya thereby became the first woman to have been awarded a doctorate (in the modern sense of the word) in mathematics. Her paper on partial differential equations contains what is now commonly known as the
Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem, which proves the existence and analyticity of local solutions to such equations under suitably defined initial/boundary conditions.
Last years in Germany and Sweden
In 1874, Kovalevskaya and her husband Vladimir returned to Russia, but Vladimir failed to secure a professorship because of his radical beliefs. (Kovalevskaya never would have been considered for such a position because of her gender.) During this time they tried a variety of schemes to support themselves, including real estate development and involvement with an oil company. But in the late 1870s they faced serious financial problems, leading to bankruptcy.
In 1875, for some unknown reason, perhaps the death of her father, Sofia and Vladimir decided to spend several years together as an actual married couple. Three years later their daughter, Sofia (called "Fufa"), was born. After almost two years devoted to raising her daughter, Kovalevskaya put Fufa under the care of relatives and friends, resumed her work in mathematics, and left Vladimir for what would be the last time.
Vladimir, who had always suffered severe mood swings, became more unstable. In 1883, faced with worsening mood swings and the possibility of being prosecuted for his role in a stock swindle, Vladimir committed suicide.
That year, with the help of the mathematician
Gösta Mittag-Leffler
Magnus Gustaf "Gösta" Mittag-Leffler (16 March 1846 – 7 July 1927) was a Sweden, Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are connected chiefly with the theory of functions that today is called complex analysis. He founded the pre ...
, whom she had known as a fellow student of
Weierstrass
Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass (; ; 31 October 1815 – 19 February 1897) was a German mathematician often cited as the " father of modern analysis". Despite leaving university without a degree, he studied mathematics and trained as a school t ...
, Kovalevskaya was able to secure a position as a ''privat-docent'' at
Stockholm University
Stockholm University (SU) () is a public university, public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, social ...
in Sweden.
Kovalevskaya met Mittag-Leffler's sister, the actress, novelist, and playwright
Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler. Until Kovalevskaya's death the two women shared a close friendship.
In 1884 Kovalevskaya was appointed to a five-year position as Extraordinary Professor (assistant professor in modern terminology) and became an editor of
Acta Mathematica
''Acta Mathematica'' is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering research in all fields of mathematics.
According to Cédric Villani, this journal is "considered by many to be the most prestigious of all mathematical research journ ...
. In 1888 she won the ''Prix Bordin'' of the
French Academy of Science, for her work "Mémoire sur un cas particulier du problème de la rotation d'un corps pesant autour d'un point fixe, où l'intégration s'effectue à l'aide des fonctions ultraelliptiques du temps".
[ Her submission featured the celebrated discovery of what is now known as the " Kovalevskaya top", which was subsequently shown to be the only other case of ]rigid body
In physics, a rigid body, also known as a rigid object, is a solid body in which deformation is zero or negligible, when a deforming pressure or deforming force is applied on it. The distance between any two given points on a rigid body rema ...
motion that is "completely integrable" other than the tops of Euler
Leonhard Euler ( ; ; ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss polymath who was active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, logician, geographer, and engineer. He founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made influential ...
and Lagrange
Joseph-Louis Lagrange (born Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia[Stockholm University
Stockholm University (SU) () is a public university, public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, social ...](_blank)
, the first woman in Europe in modern times to hold such a position. After much lobbying on her behalf (and a change in the academy's rules) she was made a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation; and additional scientific and social units such ...
, but she was never offered a professorship in Russia.
Kovalevskaya, who was involved in the progressive political and feminist currents of late nineteenth-century Russian nihilism, wrote several non-mathematical works as well, including a memoir, ''A Russian Childhood'', two plays (in collaboration with Duchess Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler) and a partly autobiographical novel, ''Nihilist Girl'' (1890).
In 1889, Kovalevskaya fell in love with Maxim Kovalevsky, a distant relation of her deceased husband, but insisted on not marrying him because she would not be able to settle down and live with him.
Kovalevskaya died of flu complicated by pneumonia in 1891 at age forty-one, after returning from a vacation in Nice with Maxim. She is buried in Solna
Solna ( or , ), also known as Solna Municipality, is a municipality in central Stockholm County, Sweden, located just north of Stockholm City Centre. Its seat is located in the town of Solna, which is a part of the Stockholm urban area. Solna i ...
, Sweden, at Norra begravningsplatsen
Norra begravningsplatsen, literally "The Northern Burial Place" in Swedish, is a major cemetery of the Stockholm urban area, located in Solna Municipality. Inaugurated on 9 June 1827, it is the burial site for a number of Swedish notables.
Th ...
.
Kovalevskaya's mathematical results, such as the Cauchy–Kowalevski theorem, and her pioneering role as a female mathematician in an almost exclusively male-dominated field, have made her the subject of several books, including a biography by Ann Hibner Koblitz, a biography in Russian by Polubarinova-Kochina (translated into English by M. Burov with the title ''Love and Mathematics: Sofya Kovalevskaya'', Mir Publishers, 1985), and a book about her mathematics by R. Cooke.
Tributes
Sonya Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day is a grant-making program of the Association for Women in Mathematics
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...
(AWM), funding workshops across the United States which encourage girls to explore mathematics. While the AWM currently does not have grant money to support this program, multiple universities continue the program with their own funding.
The Kovalevsky Lecture is sponsored annually by the AWM and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific soci ...
, and is intended to highlight significant contributions of women in the fields of applied or computational mathematics.
The Kovalevskaia Fund, founded in 1985 with the purpose of supporting women in science in developing countries, was named in her honor.
The lunar crater Kovalevskaya is named in her honor.
A gymnasium in Velikiye Luki
Velikiye Luki ( rus, Вели́кие Лу́ки, p=vʲɪˈlʲikʲɪjə ˈlukʲɪ; lit. ''great meanders''. Г. П. Смолицкая. "Топонимический словарь Центральной России". "Армада-� ...
and a progymnasium in Vilnius
Vilnius ( , ) is the capital of and List of cities in Lithuania#Cities, largest city in Lithuania and the List of cities in the Baltic states by population, most-populous city in the Baltic states. The city's estimated January 2025 population w ...
are named after Sofya Kovalevskaya.
The Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation () is a foundation that promotes international academic cooperation between scientists and scholars from Germany and abroad. Established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, it is funded by t ...
of Germany bestows a bi-annual Sofia Kovalevskaya Award to promising young researchers.
Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Stockholm have streets named in honor of Kovalevskaya.
On 30 June 2021, a satellite named after her ( ÑuSat 22 or "Sofya", COSPAR 2021-059AS) was launched into space as part of the Satellogic Aleph-1 constellation.
Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya Bust.jpg, Bust by Finnish sculptor Walter Runeberg
RR5110-0034R 150-летие со дня рождения С.В. Ковалевской.gif, Commemorative coin
A commemorative coin is a coin issued to commemorate some particular event or issue with a distinct design with reference to the occasion on which they were issued. Some coins of this category serve as collector's items only, while most commemora ...
, 2000
Stamp of USSR 1635g.jpg, Soviet Union postage stamp, 1951
In film
Kovalevskaya has been the subject of three film and TV biographies.
* ''Sofya Kovalevskaya'' (1956) directed by Iosef Shapiro, starring Yelena Yunger, Lev Kolesov and Tatyana Sezenyevskaya.
* ''Berget på månens baksida'' (" A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon") (1983) directed by Lennart Hjulström
Lennart Hjalmar Hjulström (18 July 1938 – 3 July 2022) was a Swedish actor and director. He was married to Gunilla Nyroos and father of Niklas and Carin Hjulström. His father was Filip Hjulström.
Partial filmography
*1983: '' Berget ...
, starring Gunilla Nyroos as Sofja Kovalewsky and Bibi Andersson as Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, Duchess of Cajanello, and sister to Gösta Mittag-Leffler.
* '' Sofya Kovalevskaya''
(1985 TV)
' directed by Azerbaijani director Ayan Shakhmaliyeva, starring Yelena Safonova as Sofia.
In fiction
* ''Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky'' (1983), Don H. Kennedy, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio
* ''Beyond the Limit: The Dream of Sofya Kovalevskaya'' (2002), , a biographical novel by mathematician and educator Joan Spicci, published by '' Tom Doherty Associates, LLC'', is an historically accurate portrayal of her early married years and quest for an education. It is based in part on 88 of Kovalevskaya's letters, which the author translated from Russian to English.
*
2021 ebook edition
* '' Against the Day'', a 2006 novel by Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, Literary genre, genres and Theme (narrative), th ...
was speculated before release to be based on the life of Kovalevskaya, but in the finished novel she appears as a minor character.
* "Too Much Happiness" (2009), short story by Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro ( ; ; 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short story cycles.
Munro's ...
, published in the August 2009 issue of ''Harper's Magazine
''Harper's Magazine'' is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts. Launched in New York City in June 1850, it is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. ''Harper's Magazine'' has ...
'' features Kovalevskaya as a main character. It was later published in a collection of the same name.
See also
* Cauchy–Kowalevski theorem
* Kowalevski top
*Timeline of women in science
This is a timeline of women in science, spanning from ancient history up to the 21st century. While the timeline primarily focuses on women involved with natural sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics, it also includes women f ...
* Timeline of women in mathematics
Selected publications
* (The surname given in the paper is "von Kowalevsky".)
*
*
*
*
*
*
Novel
* ''Nihilist Girl'', translated by Natasha Kolchevska with Mary Zirin; introduction by Natasha Kolchevska. Modern Language Association of America (2001)
References
Further reading
* Cooke, Roger (1984).''The Mathematics of Sonya Kovalevskaya'' (Springer-Verlag)
* Kennedy, Don H. (1983). ''Little Sparrow, a Portrait of Sofia Kovalevsky. Athens: Ohio University Press.''
* Koblitz, Ann Hibner (1993). ''A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia – Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary''. Lives of women in science, 99-2518221-2 (2., revised ed.). New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. P.
* Koblitz, Ann Hibner (1987). Sofia Vasilevna Kovalevskaia in
*
* ''The Legacy of Sonya Kovalevskaya: proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, held October 25–28, 1985''. Contemporary mathematics, 0271–4132; 64. Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society. 1987.
*
External links
"Sofia Kovalevskaya", Biographies of Women Mathematicians
Agnes Scott College
Agnes Scott College is a Private university, private Women's Colleges in the Southern United States, women's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Decatur, Georgia. The college enrolls approximately 1,000 undergra ...
*
Women's History – Sofia Kovalevskaya
Brief biography of Sofia Kovalevskaya
by Yuriy Belits. University of Colorado at Denver
The University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) is a Public university, public research university located in downtown Denver, Colorado. It is part of the University of Colorado system. Established in 1912 as an extension of the University of C ...
, March 17, 2005.
Biography (in Russian)
Sof'i Kovalevskoy street, Saint Petersburg (OpenStreetMap)
Sof'i Kovalevskoy street, Moscow (OpenStreetMap)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kovalevskaya, Sofya
19th-century mathematicians from the Russian Empire
Corresponding members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
Writers from Moscow
Russian mathematicians
Russian women mathematicians
Heidelberg University alumni
1850 births
1891 deaths
Deaths from pneumonia in Sweden
Emigrants from the Russian Empire to Sweden
Russian nihilists
Russian women novelists
19th-century women scientists from the Russian Empire
19th-century novelists from the Russian Empire
19th-century women writers from the Russian Empire
19th-century writers from the Russian Empire
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
19th-century women mathematicians
Women's firsts