Sofya Kovalevskaya (born 1850, Russian Empire – died 1891, Stockholm, Sweden) was a mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics, Professor at Stockholm University. As women were not permitted in the high school in the Russian Empire, she was forced to live abroad to study there. She was a pioneer for women in mathematics around the world – the first woman to obtain a doctorate (in the modern sense) in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor.
