Biography
Ladyzhenskaya was born and grew up in Kologriv. She was the daughter of a mathematics teacher who is credited with her early inspiration and love of mathematics. In October 1937 her father was arrested by the NKVD and soon killed. Young Olga was able to finish high school but, because her father was an "enemy of the people", she was forbidden to enter the Leningrad University.
After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, Ladyzhenskaya presented her doctoral thesis and was given the degree she had long before earned. She went on to teach at the university in Leningrad and at the Steklov Institute, staying in Russia even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapid salary deflation for professors.
Read more about this topic: Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)