Sofia Kovalevskaya - Student Years

Student Years

In 1869, Kovalevskaya began attending the University of Heidelberg, Germany, which allowed her to audit classes as long as the professors involved gave their approval. Shortly after beginning her studies there, she visited London with Vladimir, who spent time with his colleagues Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin, while she was invited to attend George Eliot's Sunday salons. There, at age nineteen, she met Herbert Spencer and was led into a debate, at Eliot's instigation, on "woman's capacity for abstract thought". This was well before she made her notable contribution of the "Kovalevsky top" to the brief list of known examples of integrable rigid body motion (see following section). George Eliot was writing Middlemarch 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." Kovalevskaya participated in social movements and shared ideas of utopian socialism. In 1871 she traveled to Paris together with her husband in order to attend to the injured from the Paris Commune. Kovalevskaya helped save Victor Jaclard, who was the husband of her sister Ann (Anne Jaclard). After two years of mathematical studies at Heidelberg under such teachers as Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen, she moved to Berlin, where she had to take private lessons from Karl Weierstrass, as the university would not even allow her to audit classes. In 1874 she presented three papers—on partial differential equations, on the dynamics of Saturn's rings and on elliptic integrals —to the University of Göttingen as her doctoral dissertation. With the support of Weierstrass, this earned her a doctorate in mathematics summa cum laude, bypassing the usual required lectures and examinations. She thereby became the first woman in Europe to hold that degree. Her paper on partial differential equations contains what is now commonly known as the Cauchy-Kovalevski theorem, which gives conditions for the existence of solutions to a certain class of those equations.