Sofya yanovskaya biography of albert king

View two larger pictures. Biography Let us first note that Sof'ja Aleksandrovna Janovskaja 's name appears in several different forms. Both Sof'ya and Sof'ja are common forms of her first name while Yanovskaya and Janovskaja are both common forms of her married name. Her maiden name was Neimark. Sof'ja Aleksandrovna Neimark's father was Alexander Neimark who was an accountant.

She was born into a Jewish family living in Pruzhany, a village near Kobrin, which at that time was in the Russian Empire, but is now in Belarus. The census of , taken shortly after her birth, shows Pruzhany with a population of 7 , , of whom about 60 per cent were Jewish. However, Sof'ja was not brought up in Pruzhany since, when she was still young, her family moved to Odessa, a major Black Sea port.

Yanovskaya was born in (so 8 years after Schönfinkel), and grew up in Odessa.

In Odessa was the site of a workers' uprising, and the murder of hundreds of citizens must have had a large influence on the nine year old Sof'ja. She was educated in classics and mathematics at the Gymnasium in Odessa where she was fortunate enough to be taught by Ivan Jure'vich Timchenko, a major figure in the study of the history of mathematics especially that of the theory of analytic functions.

There she studied mathematics under Timchenko, who we mentioned above, and also Samuil Osipovich Shatunovsky who was interested in a wide variety of mathematical topics including group theory, the theory of numbers, and geometry. He used the axiomatic method to lay the logical foundations of geometry, algebraic fields, Galois theory and analysis and his areas of interest had a large influence on his student Neimark.

When the Russian Revolution arrived in , Neimark became politically active. She had already joined the underground Red Cross, which assisted political prisoners, while she was studying at the Gymnasium. She joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Communist Party in November even though at this time it was an illegal organisation in Odessa.

In she served the Red Army as a political commissar and became an editor for the Kommunist newspaper in Odessa. From to she worked for the Odessa Regional Party and throughout this period she had essentially given up her academic studies - in particular mathematics had been pushed into the background.