Sofia Kovalevskaya Married a Stranger to Get Permission to Study Math Abroad

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya was a Russian mathematician born in 1850 who could not, under Russian law of the 1860s, attend university. The available workaround was a fictitious marriage to a man willing to travel abroad with her and leave her free to study. She found one in 1868 in Vladimir Kovalevskij, a paleontologist and publisher of progressive scientific texts. The arrangement was essentially platonic, conducted with the approval of both families, and gave Sofia the legal cover to leave Russia in 1869. She enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, then continued to Berlin to study under the analyst Karl Weierstrass, who initially refused to teach a woman and was talked into private tutorials.

In 1874, she defended a doctoral dissertation at Göttingen summa cum laude — three papers, including the first published version of what is now the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem on partial differential equations. She was the first woman in modern times to earn a PhD in mathematics in the proper sense. The European academic system had no path forward for her; she returned to Russia and spent five years unable to find a teaching position. The Cauchy-Kovalevskaya results would eventually go into every textbook.

Her career resumed in 1883, when the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler offered her a position at Stockholm's new university. She was promoted to ordinary professor in 1889 — the first European woman in modern times to hold a full mathematics chair. The previous year, in 1888, she had won the French Academy of Sciences' Bordin Prize for an essay on the rotation of a heavy rigid body around a fixed point — a problem the Academy had set as the year's competition. The judges, not knowing the author, doubled the prize money on receiving her solution. She died of pneumonia in 1891 at 41, having become the third completely integrable rigid body, the Kovalevskaya top, in classical mechanics.