Russian mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya was honoured by Google Doodle on her 97th birth anniversary. She was known for her work on partial differential equations and fluid dynamics.
Born in Kologriv, Soviet Russia on 7 March 1922, Ladyzhenskaya overcame both personal and political obstacles throughout her career, which saw her author more than 250 papers.
Ladyzhenskaya made valuable contributions to the field of fluid dynamics. Her research continues to impact oceanography, cardiovascular science, aerodynamics, and weather forecasting.
"She was perhaps the premier worker on the Russian side," Dr Marshall Slemrod, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, was quoted as saying by The New York Times when Ladyzhenskaya died at the age of 81.
According to a report in The Independent, Ladyzhenskaya was also a lover of arts. She got involved in the St Petersburg intellectual scene and befriended writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union.
Ladyzhenskaya also became friends with poet Anna Akhmatova, whose work denounced Stalin’s regime.
The mathematician provided the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier-Stokes equations. In 2002, two years before she died, she was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal.
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