13/09/2023

In a column in Folha, Viana tells the story of Sofia Kovalevski.

Foto: Wikimedia

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.

The origin of her love for mathematics is the most unusual and fortuitous I know: when she was a teenager, the walls of her room were for a time covered with pages from Ostrogradsky's calculus book that her father had used at school. In them, young Sofia (1850–1891) learned the rudiments of differentiation and integration.

But 19th-century Russia did not offer women opportunities for a scientific education, and her family disapproved of Sofia's and her friends' ideas about female emancipation. So she took the only path available: at 18, she entered into a sham marriage with the young paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevski. The following year, they traveled to Heidelberg, where he studied geology and she took classes with scientists such as G. Kirchhoff and H. von Helmholtz.

In 1871, when Vladimir went to Jena to pursue his doctorate, Sofia moved to Berlin, where, for four years, she studied under the guidance of the greatest mathematician of her time: Karl Weierstrass. During this period, she wrote three excellent scientific papers, which formed her doctoral thesis, the first defended by a woman.

His most important result, known as the Cauchy–Kovalevski theorem (the Frenchman A. Cauchy proved a particular case, Kovalevski obtained the general case), remains a cornerstone of the theory of differential equations to this day.

Despite her doctorate and emphatic letters of support from Weierstrass, Sofia was unable to find employment anywhere in Europe. In 1874, she reunited with Vladimir in Russia and, for reasons unknown, they began living together as a married couple. Their only daughter, Fufa, was born in 1878.

However, Vladimir also failed to secure employment at the university due to his radical political views, and, naively, ended up getting involved in risky business ventures. In 1883, ruined and at risk of being prosecuted for fraud, he committed suicide.

That same year, with the help of the Swedish mathematician G. Mittag-Leffler, Sofia finally secured a position as a university professor in Stockholm, where she conducted some of her most important research.

In 1888, she won the Bordin Prize from the French Academy of Sciences with her paper "The Rotation of a Solid Body": the evaluators were so impressed with her work that they increased the prize money from 3,000 to 5,000 francs!

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.