Overlooked Russian greats: Kovalevskaya, Sofia

К – Ковалевская Софья

Being the first Russian female mathematician and the first female mathematician professor in the world, Sofia Kovalevskaya literally broke barriers for women in science. Her most important work was ‘The Rotation of a Rigid Body about a Fixed Point’, in which she discovers a third classic way of solving a problem, moving forward the work started by Leonhard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. She was also a talented author, writing both in Russian and Swedish.