A letter to Mittag-Leffler

Abstract

What is this about? In December 1884 Sofya, who went to spend Christmas in Berlin, writes to Mittag-Leffler, who is in Paris, a rather long letter. Like all Sofya’s letters to Gösta, this one belongs to the Mittag-Leffler Institute. Reinhard Bölling was kind enough to send me a copy, which I had requested because I had read an allusion to the mathematics it contains in [Kozlov 2000] (there is a translation into Russian of Sofya’s correspondence with Mittag-Leffler [Yushkevich 1984]); I found right off that it is a very beautiful letter, and I am very happy to have authorization to publish it here: it contains personal and social apects that will clarify other chapters of this book. Above all it contains very interesting mathematical remarks. Its mathematical content was reproduced by Pelageya Kochina [1985, p. 293], and it is the mathematical formulas of this letter that appear on the cover of her book. The English translation here is directly from the original French.