Olga Ladyzhenskaya's 97th birth anniversary celebrated by Google Doodle

Today’s Google Doodle is celebrating the 97th birth anniversary of Russian mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya, who has been known for her work in differential equations and fluid dynamics. Apart from just the doodle, Google has also put out a YouTube video which details her life’s work and achievements. [caption id=“attachment_6211891” align=“alignnone” width=“800”] Google Doodle.[/caption] The shape of the doodle is in an elliptical form with her quasi-linear equation written underneath it. Olga was born during a time of civil unrest in the Soviet Union and her father, a mathematician who inspired Olga’s love for maths was labeled as “enemy of the people” by the government. He was arrested and subsequently killed leaving her family name tainted in the eyes of the Soviets. She was denied admission into one of Russia’s oldest educational institutions which was Leningrad University. However, after the death of Josef Stalin in 1952, Olga got her chance to be in Leningrad and presented her doctoral thesis to receive a PhD in Mathematics. Her famous works include the first definitive proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier-Stokes equations. She has 250 papers to her name and also became the president of St Petersburg Mathematical Society in 1990. For her contributions to the world of mathematics, Olga was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2002. Ladyzhenskaya died on January 12, 2004, at the age of 81.