Olga Ladyzhenskaya

Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya was a Russian mathematician, born in Kologriv on 7 March 1922 and died on 12 January 2004, who worked on partial differential equations, fluid dynamics and the finite-difference method for the Navier-Stokes equations. Her father was executed by the NKVD in 1937, and she was admitted to Moscow State University in 1943, graduated in 1947 and defended her PhD there in 1951 under Sergei Sobolev and Vladimir Smirnov. She joined the mathematical physics laboratory of the Steklov Institute in 1954 and became its head in 1961. She provided the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier-Stokes equations, analyzed the regularity of parabolic and quasilinear elliptic equations, and authored more than two hundred publications including six monographs. She received the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002.