Elizaveta Litvinova

[2] Born in 1845 in czarist Russia as Elizaveta Fedorovna Ivashkina, she completed her early education at a women's high school in Saint Petersburg.

In 1866 Elizaveta married Viktor Litvinov, who, unlike Vladimir Kovalevsky (Sofia Kovalevskaya's husband), would not allow her to travel to Europe to study at the universities there.

Litvinova was one of the few to ignore the decree and she remained to continue her studies, earning her baccalaureate in Zürich in 1876.

She taught at a women's high school and supplemented her meager income by writing biographies of more famous mathematicians such as Kovalevskaya and Aristotle.

Although no subsequent records have been found, it is believed that she must have died soon after, possibly in the Russian famine of 1921–1922 or earlier.