Curiosity
... hours. She eventually made the pages' content make sense to her (Lighter, 699). After concluding her secondary schooling, Sonya continued to push her education into a university level. However, universities near her were no open to women. The closets schools were in Switzerland, and young, unmarried women were not permitted to travel alone. This did not stop Sonya, she got married Vladimir Kovalevsky in September 1868 to solve her dilemma. For the first few months of their marriage they remained in Petersburg, then they traveled to Heidelberg where Sonya gained a small fame. The people were impressed with this quiet Russian girl with such an outstanding academic reputation (Perl, 131). In 1870, Sonya wanted to pursue studies under Karl Weierstrass at the University of Berlin. At first he did not take her seriously, but after evaluating a problem set he had given her, he realized the genius in his presence. He tutored her privately because the university still would not permit women to attend. Sonya studied under him for four years. "These studies had the deepest possible influence on my entire career in mathematics. They determined finally and irrevocably the direction I was to follow in my later scientific work: all my work has been done precisely in the spirit of Weierstrass" (Rappaport, 566). In 1874 Sonya was awarded a doctorate on the merit of her hard work from the University of Gottingen. She entitled it On the Theory of Partial Differential Equations. In the same time period, she completed her works of On the Reduction of a Definite Class of Abelian Integrals of the Third Range and Supplementary Research and Observations on Laplace's Research on the Form of the Saturn Ring (Mishna). In 1883, Sonya received an invitation from an acquaintance and former student of Weiestrass, Gosta Mittag-Leffler, to lecture at the University of Stockholm. This was only meant to be a temporary position for her, but after five years Sonya had proven herself to the univer...