[127] Saturday Review, January 10, 1874.
[128] Personal Recollections, From Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville, p. 80, Boston, 1874.
[129] Personal Recollections, ut sup., p. 5.
[130] Sónya Kovalévsky, Her Recollections of Childhood, With a Biography, by Anna Carlotta Leffler, p. 219, New York, 1895.
[131] "The prize was doubled to five thousand francs, on account of the 'quite extraordinary service rendered to mathematical physics by this work,' which the Academy of Sciences pronounced 'a remarkable work.' The competing dissertations were signed with mottoes, not with names, and the jury of the Academy made the award in utter ignorance that the winner was a woman. Her dissertation was printed, by order of the Academy, in the Mémoires des Savants Etrangers. In the following year Mme. Kovalévsky received a prize of fifteen hundred kroner from the Stockholm Academy for two works connected with the foregoing."
[132] Men of science will realize the capacity of this gifted Russian woman as a mathematician when they learn that she gave in the University of Stockholm courses of lectures on such subjects as the following:
Theory of derived partial equations; theory of potential functions; applications of the theory of elliptic functions; theory of Abelian functions, according to Weierstrass; curves defined by differential equations, according to Poincaré; application of analysis to the theory of whole numbers. How many men are there who give more advanced mathematical courses than these?
[133] To a friend, who expressed surprise at her fluttering to and fro between mathematics and literature, she made a reply which deserves a place here, as it gives a better idea than anything else of the wonderful versatility of this gifted daughter of Russia. "I understand," she writes, "your surprise at my being able to busy myself simultaneously with literature and mathematics. Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination, and one of the leading mathematicians of our century states the case quite correctly when he says that it is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. Only, of course, in order to comprehend the accuracy of this definition, one must renounce the ancient prejudice that a poet must invent something which does not exist, that imagination and invention are identical. It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing. As for myself, all my life I have been unable to decide for which I had the greater inclination, mathematics or literature. As soon as my brain grows wearied of purely abstract speculations it immediately begins to incline to observations on life, to narrative, and vice versa, everything in life begins to appear insignificant and uninteresting, and only the eternal, immutable laws of science attract me. It is very possible that I should have accomplished more in either of these lines, if I had devoted myself exclusively to it; nevertheless, I cannot give up either of them completely."
From Ellen Key's Biography of the Duchess of Cajanello, quoted in Anna Leffler's biography of Sónya Kovalévsky, ut sup, pp. 317-318.