Abstract
It was in January 1990. Finally, just two months after the Berlin Wall had fallen, I had the opportunity to spend a few days at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Djursholm, a small town just northeast of Stockholm. The palatial villa that today houses the Institute is the former home of Gösta Mittag-Leffler (1846–1927), and on entering its doorway I felt as if I had taken a step back into the world in which he lived. For me, the Institute’s single greatest attraction lay in its archival holdings, and particularly the extensive correspondence that linked Mittag-Leffler with many of the era’s leading mathematicians. A former student of Karl Weierstrass (1815–1897), Mittag-Leffler sought to preserve everything he could get his hands on from the master’s estate. Thanks to his efforts, many letters, manuscripts, and other documents associated with Weierstrass have survived today. In Berlin, on the other hand, where Weierstrass passed his entire scientific career, there is no corresponding collection of materials.
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- 1.
Following Weierstrass’s suggestion, Kovalevskaya’s first lectures were to be held before a special group chosen by Mittag-Leffler as a kind of test to determine whether she possessed the requisite talent to be a successful teacher. It is conceivable that she is referring here to this special circle; another possibility, of course, would be that she is writing about those who were attending Mittag-Leffler’s lectures.
- 2.
As a young Dozent in Uppsala, Mittag-Leffler received a stipend to study abroad, which he used to study first in Paris and then under Weierstrass in Berlin during 1874–1875. Thereafter, he played a key role in disseminating Weierstrass’s mathematics throughout Scandinavia.
- 3.
In 1882, Weierstrass had a copy made of his lectures on the calculus of variations for his pupil.
- 4.
Weierstrass approved of Kovalevskaya’s choice for her lectures, particularly since in her dissertation she had already done some original work in this field (Theorem of Cauchy-Kovalevskaya). Beyond this, he gave her some hints about which methods and results she should present in detail. Kovalevskaya gave her first lecture on 30 January 1884 (she spoke in German).
- 5.
During 1883, Kovalevskaya had worked intensively on the mathematical treatment of the refraction of light in a crystalline medium (integration of the Lamé differential equations).
- 6.
For his vacation on Lake Geneva, Weierstrass took the exposé Sonya gave him. He also promised to study it and give her advice, but then he put this off over and again. In her work, Kovalevskaya applied an unpublished method of Weierstrass for the integration of linear partial differential equations with constant coefficients. During the summer of 1884, she was urging him to complete the final version of his work on this subject so that she could submit her own. In a letter of 13 September 1884, he wrote her that he was “horribly tired” and that this had “made him apathetic and filled him with antipathy for all thinking and writing,” and he described himself as “mentally exhausted [gehirnmfide]” (Bölling 1993a, letter 131, p. 1). He therefore left it to her to use his unpublished work as she wished. Her paper appeared the following year in volume 6 of Acta Mathematica.
- 7.
The German reads wagkühne, an invention of Kovalevskaya’s that probably stands closest to the word wagemutig. Anne Charlotte Leffler mentions that Sonya’s “German friends used to laugh at the ridiculous and often impossible words she coined. She never allowed herself to be stopped in the flow of her conversation by any such minor considerations as the correct choice of words” (Leffler 1895, 61).
- 8.
Kovalevskaya afterward made an addition to this sentence and then added about three more words that are impossible to decipher.
- 9.
Possibly she meant to add two more words to complete the sentence.
- 10.
Kovalevskaya added this sentence in which approximately four words appear to be missing.
- 11.
The details given here about her arrival in Stockholm are entirely new. Anne Charlotte’s biography merely states: “She arrived from Finland in the evening by boat, and came as a guest to my brother [Mittag-] Leffler’s house” (Leffler 1895, 55). According to the recollections of Anne Charlotte, she first greeted Sonya only on the morning of the following day.
- 12.
On 19 November 1883, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter carried an article about Kovalevskaya entitled “An Important Guest in Stockholm.” The report began with the words: “This does not have to do with an insignificant king or prince from some friendly nation but rather a queen from the empire of science.” Before giving a few details about the monarch herself, the article pointed out that an earlier published account in another newspaper indicating that the Russian widow Kovalevskaya had come to teach as a “Privatdozent at the Stockholm Högskola” was incorrect, and her teaching activity had been arranged privately with Mittag-Leffler for a specially selected group.
- 13.
Anne Charlotte recalled this social gathering in these words: “My brother, as soon as she arrived, told her that he wanted to give a soiree in order to introduce her to his scientific friends. But she begged him to wait until she could speak Swedish. This seemed to us rather optimistic, but she kept her word. In a fortnight she could speak a little, and during the first winter she had mastered our literature …” (Leffler 1895, 58).
- 14.
The reference is to Eric Nordenskjöld (1832–1901), Swedish geologist, geographer, and Arctic explorer.
- 15.
This couple was Hugo Gyldén (1841–1896) and his wife Teresa. Gyldén, a Swedish astronomer, was a well-known authority on celestial mechanics. Nordenskjöld and Gyldén later played a vital role in securing Kovalevskaya’s appointment to a five-year professorship beginning in June 1884. Following Kovalevskaya’s death, Teresa Gyldén cared for Sonya’s daughter until she had completed primary school in Sweden, after which she returned to Moscow.
- 16.
Anne Charlotte reported that during the first weeks of her stay, Sonya did nothing but read Swedish from morning to night (cf. note 13).
- 17.
Meaning unclear.
References
Bölling, Reinhard, ed. 1993a. Briefwechsel zwischen Karl Weierstrass und Sofja KowaIewskaja. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
———. 1993b. Zum ersten Mal: Blick in einen Brief Kowalewskajas an Weierstraß. Historia Mathematica 20: 126–150.
Cooke, Roger. 1984. The Mathematics of Sonya Kovalevskaya. New York/Berlin: Springer.
Grattan-Guinness, Ivor. 1971. Materials for the history of mathematics in the Institut Mittag-Leffler. Isis 62 (3): 363–374: (213).
Koblitz, Ann Hibner. 1983. A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia: Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary. Boston/Basel: Birkhäuser.
Kochina, Pelageia Ya. 1981. Sofya Vasilevna Kovalevskaya. Moscow: Nauka.
Kochina, Pelageia Ya., and E.P. Ozhigova, eds. 1984. Perepiska S. V. Kovalevskoy i G. Mittag-Lefflera, Nauchnoye nasledstvo. Vol. 7. Moscow: Nauka.
Anne Charlotte Leffler. 1895. Sonya Kovalevsky. London: Fisher Unwin.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Institut Mittag-Leffler for the kind permission to publish the materials used in this paper, which was completed together with the translation during my joint stay at the Institut with D. E. Rowe in February 1991 – exactly 100 years after the death of Sonya Kovalevskaya.
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Rowe, D.E. (2018). Deine Sonia: A Reading from a Burned Letter by Reinhard Bölling, Translated by D. E. Rowe. In: A Richer Picture of Mathematics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67819-1_5
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