Google celebrated the Russian mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya’s 97th birth anniversary with a Google Doodle and a video about her life and achievements. She was known for her work on partial differential equations and fluid dynamics.

Ladyzhenskaya was born in Kologriv, in erstwhile Soviet Union. Her love for mathematics started from an early age since her father was a mathematics teacher and inspired her love for the subject.

However, Ladyzhenskaya had a pretty difficult childhood. The Soviet Union government labelled her father as ‘enemy of the people’ and when she was 15 years old he was arrested by the interior ministry of the Soviet Union and killed soon after.

Even though she was a great student, Ladyzhenskaya did not get permission into Leningrad University, because of her family name. It is one of the most prestigious universities in Russia. However, after the death of then Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin in 1952, she got a second chance. In 1953, she got a second chance and presented her degree.

She later taught at Leningrad University and at the Steklov Institute. Ladyzhenskaya was the first one to give precise proof of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier-Stokes equations. She was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002, two years before she died.

Follow more stories on Facebook and Twitter

First Published: Mar 07, 2019 12:07 IST