Sofja Kovalevskaja Sofya Kovalevskaya – The World’s First Female Professor of Mathematics

In 2024, women held only around 19 percent of professorships in Germany in the STEM fields of mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences, and thus remained significantly underrepresented. Yet as early as 1889, the Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya became the first woman in the world to hold a full professorship in mathematics – although the appointment was in Stockholm, not Germany. The road to that achievement was a difficult one, as she had to acquire her knowledge at a time when most women were still excluded from higher education. Her first experience with higher education was at Heidelberg University, where, as of the summer semester of 1869, she was the first woman informally permitted to attend lectures as an auditor.

Kovalevskaya’s case set an important precedent. After several other women were granted similar exceptions over the next three decades, prominent members of Heidelberg University’s Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, established in 1890, began advocating for women to be admitted to the university, as they already were elsewhere in Europe. On 19 January 1900, the Senate of Heidelberg University decided to officially admit women as students. On 28 February, the Grand Duchy of Baden issued a decree making it the first German state to grant women full access to university education. In the summer semester of 1900, Heidelberg’s first four female students officially began their course of studies, 31 years after Kovalevskaya’s pioneering role as the first woman to audit courses at the university.

By then, it had already been eleven years since the mathematician had become a professor in Stockholm. Her success was the result of extraordinary courage and perseverance. Born in 1850 as the daughter of an officer in the Tsarist army, she showed an aptitude for mathematics from an early age. She initially received no formal instruction in mathematics. However, pages from Mikhail Ostrogradsky’s writings on differential and integral calculus had been used in place of wallpaper in her childhood bedroom. This “wallpaper education” introduced her to infinitesimal calculus at the age of eleven. She went on to teach herself trigonometry until her neighbor, a mathematician, persuaded her father to support Sofya and arrange formal mathematics lessons.

At 18, Sofya entered into a marriage of convenience with the paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, enabling her to travel abroad without her father’s consent and pursue her studies – something she could not do in Russia, even as a guest auditor. In the summer semester of 1869, she began studying mathematics and natural sciences in Heidelberg, attending lectures by Hermann von Helmholtz, among others. She and her husband lived with her sister Anya on Untere Strasse, on the site of what is now a student residence. After three semesters, Sofya Kovalevskaya moved to Berlin and became a student of Karl Weierstrass, Germany’s most renowned mathematician at the time. He initially gave the young woman an especially difficult mathematical problem, expecting her to be unable to solve it. Despite Weierstrass’s support, even after proving her ability, she was not allowed to enroll or even to attend lectures, as she had done in Heidelberg. Weierstrass, therefore, taught her privately for the next three years.

In 1874, Weierstrass approached his former student Lazarus Fuchs, a professor in Göttingen, to arrange for Kovalevskaya to be awarded a doctorate in absentia (without taking an oral examination). Her dissertation, “On the Theory of Partial Differential Equations”, was graded summa cum laude. After earning her doctorate, she initially returned to Russia with her husband, where their daughter was born in 1878. After separating from her husband, she returned to Berlin in 1881. With the help of Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a friend of Weierstrass, she was finally appointed associate professor in Stockholm in 1884, which did not meet with universal approval – as expressed by the writer August Strindberg: “A female professor of mathematics is a dangerous and unwelcome phenomenon – one might even call it a monstrosity. The decision to invite her to teach in a country with so many male mathematicians far superior to her can only be explained by the Swedes’ excessive deference to the female sex.”

Sofya Kovalevskaya, however, remained undeterred. In 1888, the French Academy of Sciences awarded her the Prix Bordin for her paper “On a Special Case of the Problem of the Rotation of a Heavy Body about a Fixed Point”. The following year, she became the first woman to hold a professorship in mathematics and also received an award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Two years later, just four weeks after her 41st birthday, she died in Stockholm as a result of pneumonia. Among others, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, one of Germany’s best-endowed academic awards supporting outstanding research talent, is named after this pioneer for women in science.

(First published in 2012, updated in 2026)