rtseva's pictures for a national collection, while
the public throughout the civilized world have read in an abridgment of
the artist's diary the story of her life and of her struggle with
worldly temptations and vanities.

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the death of a prominent
Russian mathematician, Sofia Vasilievna Kovalevskaya. She, too, received
her preparatory training at home, from foreign governesses and private
tutors, and early showed a taste for mathematics. Her conservative
parents would not allow her to continue her studies away from home, and
in order to obtain her freedom, she married early and went abroad to
study her favorite subject. For two years she attended lectures on
mathematical subjects in Heidelberg, studied in Berlin under
Weierstrass, and, in 1874, at twenty-four years of age, took her
doctor's degree at Gottingen. Seven years later, Madame Kovalevskaya was
elected a member of the Moscow mathematical society. In 1884, after her
husband's death, she received the chair of mathematics at the University
of Stockholm. She soon mastered the Swedish language, and began to
publish her mathematical works and contributions to literature in that
language. In 1888, the Paris Academy of Science awarded to Madame
Kovalevskaya a prize of five thousand francs for her work on the
rotation of a solid body around a stationary point. In the following
year she won fifteen hundred crowns from the Academy of Stockholm by a
similar work. In 1889, two years before her death, she was elected
corresponding member of the Academy of Saint Petersburg.

But mathematics was not the only accomplishment of Madame Kovalevskaya.
She was a woman of great depth of feeling and of keen observation, and
possessed, in a high degree, the ability to picture her inner life in
literary and artistic form. Her personal life did not give her all she
expected from it, and in her _Struggle for Happiness: Two Parallel
Dramas_, she tried to present the fate of a person from two opposite
points of view, how it was and how it might have been. She was a strong
believer in predestination, but at the same time she admitted in human
life the existence of moments when alternatives are presented, the
choice of which will shape human life in accordance with the path taken:
she saw a parallel to her theory in Poincare's work on differential
equations. Madame Kovalevskaya's literary career had just begun to
develop and her contributions to m