Olga Ladyzhenskaya (Mathematician Series) –36×36”
Melted hand cast encaustic crayons
Olga Ladyzhenskaya (1922-2004) was born in Kologriv, Russia and, along with her sisters, grew up devotedly studying under her father, who was a math teacher. Having descended from Russian nobility and known as an intellectual, he was executed by Stalin’s regime while she was still a teenager. As a child of an “enemy of the nation,” it was difficult for her to gain entrance into universities of the USSR. Finally, during WWII, she entered Moscow State University, where she completed her PhD and continued on to Leningrad State University for her postgraduate work.
During her life, she taught and advised many students and published papers and books on wide-ranging math/physics topics. She was initially attracted to the study of partial differential equations, elasticity equations, and elliptic and parabolic equations. During the second half of her life, she was consumed by the Navier-Stokes equations and published mathematical solutions concerning the behavior of viscous fluids. Navier-Stokes equations can be used to characterize different types of flow in nature, such as how clouds travel, weather patterns, ocean currents, the motion of water in pipes, air flow around wings, and blood flow. Therefore, her work in fluid dynamics has contributed much to fields such as cardiovascular science, oceanography, aerodynamics, and meteorology.
Olga was a lover of nature, animals, and the arts. She befriended novelists and poets who spoke out against Stalin and the Soviet Union and was herself known as a lifelong rebel who gave little thought to her own safety under the repressive government. In 1989, when Communist rule ended and international travel was possible, she met mathematicians from other countries and learned for the first time that they had been researching some of the same topics as she. She had planned a trip to Florida to work for a while in a balmier climate than Russia but passed away in her sleep just a few days prior to her journey. Like other somewhat obscure but amazing people in history, she was introduced to many for the first time via a Google Doodle (March 7, 2019).
