Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Mathematicians known for contributions to partial differential equations

Google Doodle celebrates Olga Ladyzhenskaya's 97th birthday with a colorful doodle.

Olga Ladyzhenskaya was a great mathematician and a member of several Academies of Science. She made significant and important contributions to the area of partial differential equations, particularly the Navier–Stokes equations, nonlinear elliptic and parabolic equations. Outside of mathematics, Olga had a great interest in art, poetry, music, and literature. 

Olga Alexandrovna Ladyzhenskaya was born in 1922 in the tiny town Kolo-griv situated in the Kostromsk region of Russia. Her father, Alexander Ivanovich was a high school mathematics teacher and it was he who awoke Olga’s interest in natural sciences. In 1939, she graduated with honours from Kologriv’s secondary school but, being the daughter of a perceived enemy of the state, was refused admittance to Leningrad State University.

From 1943 Olga Ladyzhenskaya was a student of mathematics and mechanics at Moscow State University where she graduated in 1947. In the same year, she married A. A. Kiselev and received a recommendation from Moscow university to the graduate school of Leningrad State University (LGU), where she took a post at the Mathematics and Mechanics Department.

In 1947, for family reasons, Ladyzhenskaya moved to Leningrad and became a graduate student at Leningrad State University. There, she began her longstanding collaboration and friendship with V.I. Smirnov. She was greatly influenced by the focus among Leningradmathematicians on the study of the equations of mathematical physics.

In 1954, Ladyzhenskaya began working at the Leningrad (later renamed the St. Petersburg) Branch of the Steklov MathematicalInstitute, where, from 1961 to 1999, she headed the Laboratory on Mathematical Physics. 

Ladyzhenskaya was honoured for her work on many occasions, both in the Soviet Union (and then in Russia) and abroad. In 1954 she was awarded the first Prize of the Leningrad State University; she received the same prize again in 1961, followed by the Chebyshev Prize of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the State Prize of the USSR in 1969(the latter three jointly with N. Ural’tseva)

Olga Ladyzhenskaya passed away on January 12, 2004, in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), after laborious life devoted to mathematics and other numerous activities. There are two main directions in the scientific life of prof. Ladyzhenskaya.The first: the existence, uniqueness and regularity of solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations. The second: regularity theory for nonlinear elliptic and parabolic equations.

Today search giant Google is celebrating Olga Ladyzhenskaya 97th birthday with a colourful doodle. In the Google doodle, Olga is portraited at the centre and the Navier–Stokes momentum equation is written below.

Google Official handler for doodle posted on Twitter, "Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Olga Ladyzhenskaya, the Russian mathematician who triumphed over personal tragedy & obstacles to become widely known as one of the most influential thinkers of her generation"

Today’s #GoogleDoodle celebrates Olga Ladyzhenskaya, the Russian mathematician who triumphed over personal tragedy & obstacles to become widely known as one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. Explore more of her story → https://t.co/2pBQTwsGhH pic.twitter.com/cbSvidEsLf

— Google Doodles (@GoogleDoodles) March 7, 2019