Portrait of Sonya Kovalevski - properly Sofya Vasilyev Kovalevskaya - (1850-91), Russian mathematician and novelist. Kovalevskaya came from an aristocratic background, so was tutored privately. Despite her talent, prejudice against women prevented her from finding an academic post until the last few years of her life. She made many important contributions to the theory of differential equations, later building on this to research differential analysis. This culminated in papers such as insOn the Rotation of a Solid Body About a Fixed Pointins (1888). Her late work was performed in Stockholm. Kovalevskaya was also a fine novelist, having several books published.