Kovalevskaya was born in 1850 and grew up in an aristocratic family in Moscow. When she was eleven she found herself surrounded by calculus, literally — one wall of her bedroom was papered with notes from a calculus course her father had attended in his youth. She later wrote that she “spent whole hours of my childhood in front of that mysterious wall, trying to make out even a single sentence and find the order in which the pages ought to have followed one another.” She went on to become the first woman in history to earn a PhD in mathematics.
