Sonia Kovalevsky was the most widely known Russian mathematician of the late 19th century.

She was born Sonia Korvin to a family of the minor nobility in Moscow in 1850. (Her father was an artillery general.) She developed an early interest in poetry and mathematics. When her father objected to her studies, she continued them secretly. She did not receive a formal mathematics education in Russia. She was exposed to mathematics in a curious way. During the renovation of the family country estate, one of the children's rooms was temporarily wallpapered with some notes from a text on calculus. In her autobiography, A Russian Childhood, she recalled that she had "passed hours before that mysterious wall, trying to decipher even a single phrase and to discover the order in which the sheets ought to follow each other." At age 15 in St. Petersburg she took private lessons from a professor at the naval academy who was astounded with the quickness with which she grasped ideas. Continue reading here.