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66
SÖNYA KOVALÉVSKY
to those who consecrated themselves to it a new and
wonderful world not to be attained by simple mortals.
While referring to these my first encounters with
the domain of mathematics, I cannot refrain from
mentioning one very curious circumstance which also
contributed to excite my interest in that science.
When we transferred our abode to the country the
whole house had to be done over afresh, and all
the rooms were repapered. But as the rooms were
many, there was not paper enough for one of the
rooms belonging to us children; it was a great
undertaking to order more from St. Petersburg, and
to order for a single room was decidedly not worth
the while. They kept waiting for an opportunity,
and in the interim this ill-treated room stood for
many years with nothing but common paper on its
walls. But by a happy accident the paper used for
this first covering consisted of sheets of
Ostrogråd-sky’s lithographed lectures on the differential and the
integral calculus, bought by my father in his youth.
These sheets, spotted over with strange,
incomprehensible formulae, soon attracted my attention. I
remember how, in my childhood, I passed whole
hours before that mysterious wall, trying to decipher
even a single phrase, and to discover the order in
which the sheets ought to follow each other. By dint
of prolonged and daily scrutiny, the external aspect
of many among these formulæ was fairly engraved
on my memory, and even the text left a deep trace
on my brain, although at the moment of reading it
was incomprehensible to me.
When, many years later, as a girl of fifteen, I took
my first lesson in differential calculus from the
famous teacher in mathematics in Petersburg,
Alexander Nikolaevitch Strannoliübsky, he was aston-
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