The author of this work, Sophia Kovalevskaya, born in 1850 in Moscow to a family of science lovers, recognized as the creator of the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya Theorem, and the first woman to teach at a European university, is one of the most important mathematicians of the 19th century and a figure of great complexity and courage.

Her ingenious demonstrations of important formal characteristics transformed her ideas into true theories, not just daring hypotheses. She also paved the way—much like the contributions of Weierstrass, Dedekind, and Cantor—for the hyperdimensional leap toward modern mathematics, with its flood of non-Euclidean geometry, topology, number theory, new logic, and paradoxes. And all this with the added restriction of having worked at a time when the sphere of scientific research was an exclusively male preserve. She moved there naturally and antagonistically. She did not mimic men nor allow herself to be coded as a woman. She made herself present with her intelligence and conviction.

These autobiographical pages reconstruct the early years of a turbulent and eventful life, and her exposition manages to give a face to what abstract thought does not and cannot convey, especially because to understand mathematics at the elevated and apical levels at which Kovalevskaya practices it, it is necessary to undertake demanding mental gymnastics that only professional technical training can provide.

In fact, the strange panic and distaste that mathematics provokes in so many people is one of the reasons why the University Library decided to publish this work: by finding interesting ways to bring pure mathematics to life and to communicate the extraordinary beauty and passion for the discipline, this is a book from which both readers and mathematics benefit.