Abstract:
"A poet must see what others do not. And so must a mathematician."
Sofia Kovalevskaya
Our talk is dedicated to Sofia Vasilievna Kovalevskaya, the first female professor of mathematics in Russia and a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. She found the necessary proof existence of methods for analytically solving of Cauchy equation for systems of partial differential equations. She solved the problem of reducing a certain class of third-rank Abelian integrals to elliptic integrals. She continued the structure of Saturn's rings research, begun by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) and David Maxwell (1831-1879), and demonstrated that Saturn's rings consist of a vast number of solid bodies and rotate along a specific elliptical trajectory. In 1888, she received the Bodin Prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her solution to the problem of a rigid body (a top) rotation around a fixed point ‒ the "Kovalevskaya top." By that time, solutions for particular cases had been proposed by L. Euler (1707–1783), J. Lagrange (1736–1813), and O. I. Somov (1815–1876). Since childhood, Sofia Vasilievna was interested in poetry and literature, and left her descendants with her poems and literary memoirs.
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