A great woman, who devoted her life not only to her academic career but to rebut this stereotype, was Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1881). She was the first major Russian female mathematician, and also the first woman who was appointed to a full professorship in Europe 1889 (Stockholm University in Sweden) and achieved a chair in the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Everyone has heard the name of Marie Curie (1867-1934) who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. In 1903 she and her husband Pierre Curie won the Nobel Prize for physics for discovering the highly radioactive elements radium and polonium.

Another famous name is that of Rita Levi Montalcini (b. 1909), a neurologist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986 together with Stanley Cohen for their discoveries of growth factors.

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Marie and Pierre Curie

Rita Levi Montalcini

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