Sofia Kovalevskaya
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031134
On this date in 1850, Sofia Kovalevskaya was born in Moscow, Russian Empire. Despite her early aptitude with mathematics, women were not allowed to attend university in Russia, so she arranged a fictitious marriage to Vladimir Kovalevskij and emigrated to Germany. In 1874 she became the first woman in Europe to earn a doctoral degree in mathematics. One of the papers she published at the time introduced a theorem that gave the conditions for solutions to a set of partial differential equations. In the 1880s she moved to Sweden and became the first woman to hold a professorial chair in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor.
Date in History: 15 January 1850
