It’s is the 97th birth anniversary of Russian Mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya on Thursday. Google Doodle is celebrating her anniversary with a YouTube video on her life’s achievements.
Ladyzhenskaya was known for her work on partial differential equations and in the field of fluid dynamics. She also provided the first concrete proof of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier-Stokes equations.
Ladyzhenskaya was born in 1922, in Kologriv, RSFSR. She was the daughter of a mathematics teacher who is credited with her early inspiration and love of mathematics. In October 1939, when she was only 17 years old, her father was arrested for being ” enemy of the state” and killed.
Because of her name, she was forbidden for higher studies at the prestigious Leningrad University.
However, after the death of Premier Joseph Stalin, in 1952, she got a second chance to present her thesis and was awarded a degree.
She later went on to teach at Leningrad University and at the Steklov Institute, and stayed in Russia even after the collapse of USSR in 1991.
She was also the student of renowned mathematician Ivan Petrovsky and was in 1958 shortlisted for the Field’s Medal,a “Nobel Prize” for mathematicians, which was later given out to Klaus Roth and Rene Thom.