by Gabe Amos

In 1871 she moved to Berlin to study with Weirstrass. She was again denied admission to the university, even with Weirstrass' blessing and strong recommendation. Not to let her be discouraged, Weirstrass decided to be her private tutor over the next three years. And in those three years, she wrote three papers which Weirstrass deemed Ph.D. worthy.
Three years later, Gottingen University granted her a doctorate for her paper on partial differential equations. However, even though she was a doctorate, she was also a woman, and therefore only qualified for a schoolteacher position. There she stayed for 9 years, conducting her own studies in her free time and mothering her daughter, born in 1878.
Her husband committed suicide in 1883 after two years separation from Sofia. The shock preceded the guilt, and the guilt drove her to immerse herself in research. From then until her death in 1891, she worked to gain acceptance and respect for her research and to teach. Between 1889 and 1891, she become one of the first women to hold a chair position in a European university and won awards for two of her papers. She died in 1891 from pneumonia and influenza.

Dead mathematician...Throwing a proverbial dart at the wall of mathematicians yielded Sofia Kovalevskaya (whose visage stares down at me from the high walls of Hilbert Space).
Apparently young Sofia was attracted to mathematics at a relatively young age, sparked by her uncle who would speak about the subject. Even though she couldn't understand what it meant, his enthusiasm and respect for math kindled a curiosity she would act on in the future. When she was eleven, the walls of her room were papered with analysis lecture notes for some reason. It seems bizarre, but she naturally investigated them and found that they were semi-intelligible when combined with her knowledge from her uncle. Sofia was thereafter tutored in mathematics, albeit not for too long, as her other studies began to suffer. She instead read Algebra and physics books in her free time.
She was forbidden to leave for University without her father's written permission, so she was forced to marry Vladimir Kovalevski. This was not a happy marriage for either of them, but it did allow her to move to Heidelberg, where she officially began her university studies. Ironically, women weren't allowed to matriculate at the university. She went anyway with the blessing of her professors, who were impressed with her above average mathematical ability.