Kovalevskaia bio...interesting couple...

[Michael Bailey]

American scholar Ann Koblitz wrote a bio of Sofia Kovalevskaia
(title: _A Convergence of Lives_)
bio of Kovalevskaia, which I suspect will cast light on Yashmeen in AtD,
which I sent away for ...

Her spouse, Neal Koblitz, wrote an autobiography called
 _Random Curves_  -- he's a U of Washington
mathematician who as a student radical was the only one in the Life magazine
picture of the students taking over Harvard wearing a suit...
really nice picture, too - shaft of 60's light coming thru the window


(Mr Koblitz makes the point that math depts were quite forgiving
of such activities, so he didn't fear for his career)
also his career involved him in elliptic curve cryptography,
tied in with the internet (and tangentially related, perhaps, to
Riemann-studies...)
and - like the balloon-boys - was tight with Russians.

He says modestly that he knew quite early that although he was good at
math, he'd never
be at the top of the profession, so he learned Russian, made good money
translating Russian articles for the American Mathematical Society, and spent
several years in the USSR, from where he was able to
travel to Hanoi during the Vietnam war (apparently they prized math
and kept an academy functioning the whole time)

instead of having children, Mr and Mrs Koblitz chose to devote their
extra time and money to the Kovalevskaia Fund, which awards cash
prizes to student mathematicians in various countries including
Vietnam, where he said mathematicians were respected
as much as movie stars or football players in some other places,
although this may have eroded somewhat under World Bank etc's
privatization of schools there (a math academy founded by some of
his friends had declined to just offering business and computer courses)