Russian
mathematician and novelist who worked on partial differential equations
and Abelian integrals. In 1886 she won the Prix Bordin of the French Academy
of Sciences for a paper on the rotation of a rigid body about a point, a
problem the 18th-century mathematicians Euler and Lagrange had both failed
to solve.
She was born in Moscow and studied in Germany at Heidelberg, Berlin, and
Göttingen. Excluded from most European academic posts because of her
sex, she finally obtained a lectureship in Sweden and became professor at
Stockholm 1889. In addition to her mathematical work, she wrote plays and
novels, including Vera Brantzova 1895. |