Sofia Kovalevskaya

Sofia Kovalevskaya was a Russian mathematician who became the first woman in modern Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics, awarded by the University of Gottingen in 1874, at a time when women were generally barred from attending university lectures in Russia and much of Europe and she had to study privately and travel abroad to pursue advanced mathematics. Her doctoral work included a contribution to the theory of partial differential equations now known, together with related work by Augustin-Louis Cauchy, as the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem, which gives conditions under which certain differential equations are guaranteed to have a unique solution. In 1889 Kovalevskaya became the first woman appointed to a full professorship in mathematics at a European university, at Stockholm University in Sweden, after an extended struggle to find any institution willing to employ a woman in the role. She also won the prestigious Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Sciences in 1888 for her work on the rotation of a rigid body around a fixed point, a longstanding problem in mechanics, and she was active as a writer of fiction and memoir alongside her mathematical career.