She was born January 15, 1850, in Moscow, Russia.
Her mother's family members were German immigrants to Russia, and her father was a Lieutenant General in the Imperial Russian Army.
She developed an interest in science and mathematics early in her life; at the young age of 9, she became interested in the foundational mathematics behind calculus.
Being raised in a well-to-do family that was keenly aware of the benefits of education, she was encouraged to pursue her interest in science.
She was encouraged to continue her studies by her mentor, Nikolai Nikanorovich Tyrtov, who noticed her unusually advanced mathematical skills.
She studied nihilist doctrine, having a different meaning to her and other young people in the 1860s than to us now; nihilism praised science as the source of real truth and the most powerful way to lead masses of people to better lives.
Sofya Kovalevskaya was the first woman to receive a doctorate degree in mathematics, the first woman to hold an editorial position in the noteworthy Acta Mathematica journal, and the first woman in Northern Europe to become a full professor in the sciences.
She married paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky as a way to leave Russia, where she was prohibited from studying in universities. Upon arriving in Austria and later Germany in 1869, she began her studies at the University of Heidelberg. After moving to Berlin soon after, she was denied admission to university due to her sex. Because of this, she opted to learn privately with Karl Weierstrass, a mathematician dubbed “the father of modern analysis.” After crafting three papers and presenting them to the University of Göttingen, she was awarded her doctorate degree in absentia—again, a first for any woman at the time.
Kovalevskaya was noted for her contribution to partial differential calculus. The most important paper she wrote for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Göttingen covered the conditions necessary for solutions to a form of partial differential equations to exist. This information came to be known as the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem.
In 1883, she became a lecturer at the University of Stockholm after being invited to take the position by Magnus Littag-Leffler. She was then promoted to the honorable position of full professor in 1889, making her the first woman to do so. She went on to become a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and won the Prix-Bordin of the French Academy of Sciences in 1888.