No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
May 1999 marked the hundredth birthday of the remarkable Russian woman and eminent scientist--Academician Pelageya Yakovlevna Polubarinova-Kochina. She was born on 13 May 1899 into the family of an educated worker on a farmstead in the steppes to the north of the Caspian Sea. Her father, who was an accountant, moved from Astrakhan to Petersburg so that his children could receive higher education. In spite of all the difficulties of the war and immediate post-war years, his eldest daughter Pelageya graduated from Pokrovskaya Girls' Gymnasium and was admitted to Bestuzhevsky Women's Higher Courses (VZhK). She graduated from Petrograd University after the revolution. The family was not well-off--Pelageya Yakovlevna's father died in 1918, and she had to earn her own living while still a youngster, first by giving lessons and working as a librarian at the VZhK and then as a calculation officer the Main Geophysical Observatory. It was there that her scientific career began, and that she met her future husband Nikolai Yevgrafovich Kochin (1904Kochin ( -1944))--who was to become an academician and one of the greatest Russian scientists in the area of mechanics and meteorology during the first half of the 20th century.
During the 1920s Kochina developed fully in both character and range of interests. She was well prepared for her long years of scientific and community-based work. While the great array of eminent university professors inspired her love of science and independent research, the traditions of the Bestuzhevskaya girl students made her a persistent fighter for women's rights. It was as if her path towards research in the history of science, historico-scientific research, was sanctified by the bust of Sophia Kovalevskaya in the reading room of the VZhK.
The lectures by V. I. Smirnov and G. V. Kolosov which she attended influenced her in her decision to use the methods of the theory of functions of a complex variable in her research. Subsequent conversations with Nikolai Yevgrafovich ("over a cup of tea", as she recalls) encouraged her to apply the analytic theory of differential equations with regular singular points in fluid dynamics. Kochina's work with A. A. Fridman at the Main Geophysical Observatory and the contact she had with leading
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