WOMEN IN MATHEMATICS 163 



outside of Italy, to be thus honored. But her appointment 

 had to be made in the face of great opposition. No other 

 university, it was urged by the conservatives, had yet 

 offered a professor's chair to a woman. Strindberg, one 

 of the leaders of modern Swedish literature, wrote an ar- 

 ticle in which he proved, ' ' as decidedly as that two and two 

 make four, what a monstrosity is a woman who is a pro- 

 fessor of mathematics, and how unnecessaiy, injurious and 

 out of place she is. " * 



The fame that came to Sonya through her achievements 

 in the German and Swedish universities was immensely en- 

 hanced when, on Christmas eve, 1888, "at a solemn session 

 of the French Academy of Sciences, she received in person 

 the Prix Bordin the greatest scientific honor which any 

 woman had ever gained ; one of the greatest honors, indeed, 

 to which any one can aspire. ' ' 



She became at once the heroine of the hour and was 

 thenceforth "a European celebrity with a place in his- 

 tory. ' ' She was feted by men of science whithersoever she 

 went and hailed by the women of the world as the glory of 

 her sex and as the most brilliant type of intellectual wom- 

 anhood. 



Mme. Kovalevsky's printed mathematical works embrace 

 only a few memoirs including those which she presented 

 for her doctorate and for the Prix Bordin. But brief as 

 they are, all of these memoirs are regarded by mathemati- 

 cians as being of special value. This is particularly true of 

 the memoirs, which secured for her the Prix Bordin; for it 

 contains the solution of a problem that long had baffled the 

 genius of the greatest mathematicians. 



The prize had been opened to the competition of the 

 mathematicians of the world, and the astonishment of the 

 committee of the French Academy was beyond expression 



i Sonya KovalevsTcy, Her Recollections of Childhood, With a 

 Biography, by Anna Carlotta Leffler, p. 219, New York, 1895. 



