On October 17, 1842, Sofia Kovalevskaya was born in Moscow — though she would not become the mathematician who solved the rotation of an asymmetric top problem until she was in her late twenties, working in Stockholm after every German university had declined to hire her despite her doctoral degree from Göttingen.

Kovalevskaya was born in 1850 in Moscow (the October date reflects the Julian calendar discrepancy). She was fascinated by mathematics as a child and learned calculus from the wallpaper in a family room that had been papered with calculus lecture notes. She contracted a marriage of convenience with Vladimir Kovalevsky to obtain the legal status to study abroad — married women in Russia could travel without paternal permission.

She studied under Karl Weierstrass in Berlin, who found her so talented that he taught her privately when the University of Berlin refused to admit her. She presented three papers to the University of Göttingen and was awarded a doctorate summa cum laude in 1874 — without ever having attended the university, because women were not admitted. She then spent six years unable to find an academic position.

In 1884, the University of Stockholm hired her as a lecturer, then professor. In 1888 she won the Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Sciences — the highest prize in mathematics, doubled from its usual value because her solution to the Kovalevskaya top problem was considered exceptional. Carl Friedrich Gauss had worked on the problem decades earlier and left it unsolved.

She died of pneumonia in 1891 at forty-one.