Solve This!

I am Anna Carlotta. Sofia and I were very good friends. I am a writer. We promised that if one of us outlived the other they would write a biography about them. When I first met her I decided to write with her. We worked on a book together called The Struggle For Happiness: How It Was, How It Might Have Been. Sofia died after continuosly getting sick with pnemonia and having problems with her lungs. As I promised I am writing her biography.

Her name was Sofia Kovalevsky. Her grandfather was a mathematician and astronomer. Her family lived in a very large house in Russia. She had two sisters.

Her house was so large they ran out of wallpaper and had to use her father’s old calculus notes. When she was young she used to study the notes on our wall. When she was old enough she went to St. Petersburg to take a class in calculus. Her teacher told her she thought she must have known calculus all her life.

After college she taught herself physics, but she learned she needed to know trigonometry first, so she taught herself that, too. After Sofia learned physics and trigonometry she went back to St. Petersburg to study math. She wanted to go to a university to learn science, but to do so she had to go to Germany. The only way she could do that was for one of the three of the sisters to get married. They asked Vladimir Kavolevsky. He wished to marry Sofia.

There was only one problem. It’s improper for the youngest child to get married before the oldest. When Vladimir asked the General (her father), he said, “No.” She was not allowed out of the house unchaperoned, so she left a note telling the General where she was going and why. He followed her to Vladimir’s apartment and, as Sofia had hoped, allowed her to get married.

When she got married she went to Berlin, Germany. There she went to work with the famous mathematician Karl Weierstrasse. After four years of working with Karl she got her Ph.D. in 1874. Karl introduced her to Gosta Mittag-Leffler, my brother, a mathematician from Sweden. Gosta got her a job as a professor at the University of Stockholm in Sweden.

Sofia then went to Paris to compete for the Prix Bordin award. she won using the problem she had gaven herself, The Problem of the Rotation of a Solid Body About a Fixed Point. The subject was the form of Saturn's rings. she believed the cross section of Saturn’s rings had to be egged shaped. She proved it.

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