{"id":235040,"date":"2026-04-12T10:04:03","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T15:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/sofia-kovalevskaya-the-girl-who-wouldnt-give-up-on-math"},"modified":"2026-04-12T10:04:03","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T15:04:03","slug":"sofia-kovalevskaya-the-girl-who-wouldnt-give-up-on-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/sofia-kovalevskaya-the-girl-who-wouldnt-give-up-on-math","title":{"rendered":"Sofia Kovalevskaya: The Girl Who Wouldn\u2019t Give Up on Math"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>\u201cIt is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.\u201d-Sofia Kovalevskaya<\/em><\/p>\n<p>We don\u2019t often think of math as something that\u2019s \u201cdangerous\u201d or \u201cforbidden\u201d; after all, what could be so dangerous about numbers? Russian-born Sofia Kovalevskaya was told at numerous points during her life that she had to stop studying math, that girls weren\u2019t good enough, they weren\u2019t allowed to go to school, or teach classes, edit magazines or win awards. Sofia Kovalevskaya never gave in to the <em>couldn\u2019t\u2019s<\/em> or <em>wouldn\u2019t\u2019s<\/em>. She fought time and again for her right to continue learning and teaching, eventually becoming one of the most celebrated mathematicians of her century and the first woman professor of a northern European University. Today, we celebrate Sofia and all the young mathematicians who overcome great odds!<\/p>\n<p>When Sofia Kovalevskaya was a little girl in the early 1850\u2019s, her room wasn\u2019t wallpapered with flowers or meadowscapes, it was covered in pages and pages of math lecture not es. She would stare at the pages filled with differential and integral analysis, and while she didn\u2019t understand exactly what she saw, Sofia saw beauty in the calculations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIt is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.\u201d-Sofia Kovalevskaya We don\u2019t often think of math as something that\u2019s \u201cdangerous\u201d or \u201cforbidden\u201d; after all, what could be so dangerous about numbers? Russian-born Sofia Kovalevskaya was told at numerous points during her life that she had to stop studying math, that girls [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}