164 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



when it was found that the successful contestant was a 

 woman. 1 



Everyone admired her varied and profound knowledge, 

 but, above all, her amazing powers of analysis. A German 

 mathematician, Kronecker, did not hesitate to declare that 

 "the history of mathematics will speak of her as one of 

 the rarest investigators. ' ' 2 



Shortly before her premature death, she had planned a 

 great work on mathematics. All who are interested in the 

 intellectual capacities and achievements of woman must 

 regret that she was unable to complete what would un- 

 doubtedly have been the noblest monument of woman's 

 scientific genius. She was then in the prime of life and 

 perfectly equipped for the work she had in mind. Consid- 

 ering the extraordinary receptive and productive power of 

 this richly dowered woman, there can be little doubt, had 

 she lived a few years longer, that she would have produced 

 a work that would have caused her to be ranked among the 

 greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century. 



1 * ' The prize was doubled to five thousand francs, on account of 

 the ' quite extraordinary service rendered to mathematical physics 

 by this work/ which the Academy of Sciences pronounced 'a re- 

 markable work.' The competing dissertations were signed with mot- 

 toes, not with names, and the jury of the Academy made the award 

 in utter ignorance that the winner was a woman. Her dissertation 

 was printed, by order of the Academy, in the Memoires des Savants 

 Etrangers. In the following year Mme. Kovalevsky received a prize 

 of fifteen hundred kroner from the Stockholm Academy for two 

 works connected with the foregoing.' 7 



2 Men of science will realize the capacity of this gifted Russian 

 woman as a mathematician when they learn that she gave in the 

 University of Stockholm courses of lectures on such subjects as the 

 following : 



Theory of derived partial equations; theory of potential func- 

 tions; applications of the theory of elliptic functions; theory of 

 Abelian functions, according to Weierstrass; curves defined by differ- 

 ential equations, according to Poincare ; application of analysis to the 

 theory of whole numbers. How many men are there who give more 

 advanced mathematical courses than these? 



