[3] Award winners receive a signed certificate from the AWM and SIAM presidents.
[4] The lectures are named after Sonia Kovalevsky (1850–1891), a well-known Russian mathematician of the late 19th century.
[5] Karl Weierstrass regarded Kovalevsky as his most talented student.
In 1874, she received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Weierstrass.
Kovalevsky did her important work in the theory of partial differential equations and the rotation of a solid around a fixed point.