Maksimova was born on November 5, 1943, in Kochenyovo, the daughter of two biologists who had temporarily moved there from Tomsk State University to escape the war.
She studied mechanics and mathematics at Novosibirsk State University, publishing her first paper on Wilhelm Ackermann's axioms for strict implication in relevance logic in 1964 and graduating in 1965.
[1] Maksimova won the Maltsev Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2009, for her papers on definability and interpolation in non-classical logic.
[2] With several others from the Sobolev Institute, she won the Russian Federation Government Prize in Education in 2010.
[3] She is the subject of a festschrift, Larisa Maksimova on Implication, Interpolation, and Definability (Sergei Odintsov, ed., Springer, 2018).