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Person: Ladyzhenskaya, Olga Alexandrovna

Olga Ladyzhenskaya was a Russian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and finite-difference methods.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• Olga's birth place Kologriv was surrounded by 'wild' forests, near the picturesque river Unzha.
• It became apparent that Olga showed a strong talent for logical thinking from an early age.
• During Olga's upbringing, times were very hard especially for intellectuals descended from Russian nobility for whom everything was in short supply including food, paper and clothes.
• At University Olga's love of mathematics blossomed and she was awarded a Stalin stipend and a labourers ration card without which she would have been unable to survive.
• Olga remained single for the rest of her life.
• In 1949 Olga defended her doctoral dissertation (comparable to an habilitation) which was on the development of finite differences methods for linear and quasilinear hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations, formally supervised by Sobolev though in practice it was Smirnov.
• Olga started to prepare her diploma thesis on a problem suggested by Petrovsky.
• Many papers written jointly by Olga and Nina Ural'tseva were devoted to the investigation of quasilinear elliptic and parabolic equations of the second order.
• From the mid-1950's Olga and her students made advances in the study of boundary-value problems for quasilinear elliptic and parabolic equations.
• The following are a few of the numerous awards and achievements in Ladyzhenskaya's life.
• In the Museum of Science (Boston, USA) Olga Ladyhenskaya's name is among other influential mathematicians of the 20th century carved on a large marble desk in the Mathematics Exhibition Hall.
• Olga had not been allowed to travel outside Eastern Europe, apart from in 1958 when she attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh, and not again until 30 years later in 1988.
• It was then that Leray saw the sights of Leningrad for the first time, including the Hermitage, Peterhof, and on meeting Olga realized that they had been researching the same topics.
• When Olga first started to work on the Navier-Stokes equation, she was unaware of the work of Leray and Eberhard Hopf.
• Olga, was not only interested in mathematics and science, but she had a passion for arts and was an active participant in the intellectual community of St Petersburg.
• Olga's reputation as an independent spirit was furthered by her friendship with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author and dissident.
• Anna Akhmatova a famous Russian poet, knew Ladyzhenskaya so well that she devoted a poem to her.

Born 7 March 1922, Kologriv, Kostroma province, Russia. Died 12 January 2004, St Petersburg, Russia.

View full biography at MacTutor

Tags relevant for this person:

Origin Russia, Women

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

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@J-J-O'Connor

@E-F-Robertson

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive