In honor of what would have been famed Russian mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya's 97th birthday, Google's doodle team put together a tribute graphic for the search engine's homepage Thursday celebrating a woman "who triumphed over personal tragedy and obstacles to become one of the most influential thinkers of her generation."
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Born in the rural Russian town of Kologriv in 1922, Ladyzhenskaya’s interest in mathematics began at a young age thanks to her father’s teaching career.
But in 1937, when she was just 15, Ladyzhenskaya watched her father get arrested by Stalinist authorities.
According to novelist Alexander Solschenizyn's epic "The Gulag Archipelago," Ladyzhenskaya's father had actually been warned that his name was on a list, a list labeling him an "enemy of the state." But the local teacher stayed in town and refused to leave his students behind. He was then executed without a trial, an event that left his wife and daughters emotionally scarred and dependent on selling dresses, shoes and soap to make ends meet, according to the Google Doodle blog.
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Still, unlike her two older sisters, Ladyzhenskaya went on to finish high school and even passed the entrance exams for the prestigious Leningrad University. Unfortunately, her father’s label hindered her acceptance. This setback didn’t stop her from continuing her education.
Ladyzhenskaya eventually found herself at Moscow University in 1943, where she earned her PhD and later led the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics at the Steklov Mathematical Institute. She'd go on to write more than 250 mathematical papers covering "the whole spectrum of partial differential equations," according to an Agnes Scott feature.
In 1969, the math whiz earned the State Prize of the USSR, was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1981 and was also elected to serve as president of the Leningrad Mathematical Society from 1990 to 1998, just as communist rule had ended and the country’s economic situation began worsening.
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Two years before her death on Jan. 12, 2004, Ladyzhenskaya was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal by the Russian Academy of Sciences, an honor dedicated to "outstanding achievements in the natural sciences and the humanities."
"Dr. Marshall Slemrod, a mathematician with the University of Wisconsin, said Dr. Ladyzhenskaya had an American counterpart in John Nash, the Princeton mathematician and Nobel laureate whose life is depicted in the film 'A Beautiful Mind,' and who also studied partial differential equations," according to her New York Times obituary. "'She was perhaps the premier worker on the Russian side.' Dr. Slemrod said. 'If you believe your weather forecast, you have to solve the exact equations that she studied.'"
Ladyzhenskaya died in her sleep in her St. Petersburg home. She was 81.
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