0000000000685386
AUTHOR
Lene Birkeland
Per Ardua Ad Astra : Personer og omstendigheter på Sofya Kovalevskayas vei til berømmelse
Master's thesis in Mathematics education (MA500) Dette er rapporten fra et historisk-biografisk prosjekt om Sofya Kovalevskaya, der noen russiske og polske arkivkilder om henne som er lite kjent fra før, er hentet frem, oversatt og drøftet. Disse nye kildene kaster nytt lys på flere sider ved hennes person og virksomhet. Oppgaven er stilt som den avsluttende delen av mastergradsstudiet i matematikkdidaktikk ved Universitetet i Agder. Jeg innleder med et kort beskrivelse av Londa Schiebingers fire tilnærminger til feministisk historiografi, som jeg har brukt som struktureringsredskaper for prosjektgjennomføringen. Deretter gir jeg en oversikt over Kovalevskayas levnetsløp, og beskriver kort …
A letter from Malevich to Semevsky about Kovalevskaya
Abstract The biographical literature on Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya has to a large extent relied on her own memoirs, published in Vestnik Evropy only months before her death, and an autobiographical story published posthumously in Russkaya Starina. In this paper we present and discuss the full Russian text with English translation of a letter, previously unpublished, from Kovalevskaya's teacher in childhood and adolescence, Iosif Ignatyevich Malevich, to the editor of Russkaya Starina, Mikhail Ivanovich Semevsky, in which he repudiates her depreciation of his role in her schooling, criticizes her self-portrayal, and provides information about her early education which runs counter to part…
The sine anecdote in Kovalevskaya’s memoirs; British Journal for the History of Mathematics
In Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya’s memoirs there is a rather ambiguous story about how she came to understand trigonometric functions on her own as a teenager by reading the chapter on optics in Tyrtov’s elementary physics textbook. Furthermore, she claims that in so doing, she happened to follow ‘the same road that had been taken historically: that is, instead of a sine I used a chord’. We examine Tyrtov’s textbook in search of sources for such inspiration and quote hitherto unknown critical reactions to her autobiographical reflections by Kovalevskaya’s teacher I I Malevich. We conclude that Kovalevskaya’s memoirs may well be marred by personal interests and/or faltering memory. By adding…