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  • Essay / The life and scientific activity of Sofia Kovalevskaya

    Have you ever heard of the great mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya? Probably not. Does this mean anything to you? Partial differential equations. Sofia Kovalevskaya is a Russian mathematician and writer who has made acclaimed contributions to partial differential equations, mechanics, and analysis. Did you know that Sofia was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics, the first to be appointed professor of mathematics, and the first to join the editorial board of a scientific journal in modern Europe. Say no to plagiarism. Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay Sofia Kovalevskaya was the middle child of an artillery general, Vasily Korvin - Krukovsky and Yelizaveta Shubert, who are both were members of the Russian nobility and were well educated. Sofia and mathematics were like love at first sight. His uncle had great respect for the field of mathematics. When Sofia was 11, her nursery lined its walls with pages of notes on integral and differential analysis. She first undertook her own studies of mathematics with a family tutor, YI Malevich. Sofia was a very passionate woman. In 1868, she married a paleontologist named Vladimir Kovalevsky so that she could leave Russia and study. The couple traveled to Austria and then to Germany, where, in 1869, she studied at the famous University of Heidelberg with the famous mathematicians Leo Koenigsberger and Paul du Bois-Reymond and the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. The following year, she moved to Berlin, Germany, where she was refused entry to university because of her gender, encouraging her to study privately with the mathematician Karl Weierstrass. In 1874 she presented three papers on partial differential equations, the rings of Saturn and elliptic integrals at the University of Göttingen as a doctoral essay and received the diploma. The article she had written on partial differential equations gained valuable recognition within the prestigious European mathematical community. It contained what is now officially known as the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem. Which gives the conditions for the existence of a certain level of partial differential equations. After graduating, she returned home to Russia. Her daughter was then born in 1978. And in 1881, she separated from her husband. In 1883, Sofia accepted Magnus Mittag-Leffler's invitation to become a lecturer in mathematics at the famous Stockholm University. She was later promoted to full professor in 1889 because of her incredible skills and passion for mathematics. Then, in 1884, she joined the editorial board of the mathematical journal Acta Mathematics. In 1888, she became the first woman to be elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The same year, she received the Bordin Prize from the French Academy of Sciences for another article she wrote which focused on the rotation of a solid body around a fixed point. In 1889, Sofia became the first woman to hold a professorship at a European university since physicist Laura Bassia and Maria Gaetana Agnesi. Sofia taught courses on the latest analysis topics and became editor of Acta Mathematica, a new journal. She also took up the theme of liaison with mathematics from Paris and Berlin and participated in international conferences. Sofia's last published work was a short article in which she gave a new and simple proof of Brun's theorem on a property of the potential function of a homogeneous body. Keep in mind..