Remembering Sophia Kovalevsky

With Reason: A Portrait     by JoAnne Growney   (June 2012)

        Sophia Kovalevsky *    (1850-1891)

Because she was Russian  . . .
Because she had abundant curly hair . . .
Because she loved mathematics . . .
Because she was born in the 19th century . . .
Because lecture notes for calculus papered  her nursery walls . . .
Because her parents forbade her to leave home . . .
Because a woman could not travel abroad from Russia 
                    without her father or a husband . . .
Because she found a kind man to marry . . .
Because ideas came to her in torrents . . .
Because she married a man she did not love . . .

Because her sister died . . .
Because her mind was powerful . . .
Because her passion was  mathematics . . .
Because her mentor was Karl Weierstrass  . . .
Because she extended Cauchy’s theorem  
                    for partial differential equations . . .
Because she could not care for her daughter 
                    when exhausted by mathematics . . .
Because she investigated  the refraction of light . . .
Because she knew Saturn’s rings are unstable . . .
Because she wrote novels and a memoir . . .
Because she struggled with happiness . . .

Because she went to Sweden and the Northern Lights . . .
Because she understood  fixed points completely . . .
Because her paper on the Rotation of a Solid Body 
                    about a Fixed Point won the Bordin Prize . . .
Because she continued Abel’s quest to express Abelian integrals 
                    using elliptic functions . . .
Because she was the first woman professor 
                    at a European University . . .
Because her colleagues were not women  . . .
Because she had a friend -- Anne-Charlotte Leffler -- 
                    and they wrote a play together. . .
Because she dreamed mathematics even in a lover’s  arms . . .
Because a poet wrote “To her whose star shines bright” . . .

Because she caught influenza, complicated by pneumonia, 
                    at age 41 Sophia Kovalevsky died.

* Russian names have masculine and feminine forms -- and the commonly used spelling "Kovalevsky" has a masculine ending.  In Russia, Sophia's surname is "Kovalevskaya."

I am seeking more poems about women in mathematics to post here; please send me yours or those by other poets --  CELEBRATE math-women:  women who are alive or ones who have passed; women of fame or those without; women out in front or those in quiet corners -- women we want to remember. E-mail poems to me using this address:   wow (at) joannegrowney (dot) com.