Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (1850-1891), Russian mathematician. Kovalevskaya was the first female member of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Despite the attitudes of the time towards academic work by women, she gained respect for her work on differential equations and Abelian integrals. She was appointed to the University of Stockholm, and in 1888 she won the prestigious Prix Bordin prize (awarded by the French Academy of Science) for her groundbreaking paper On the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point. Photographed in 1871.