1896-1966

A few years after her birth in 1896 in Poland (now Kobrin, Belarus), Janovskaja and her family moved to Odessa and, after an early education in the classics, she entered the Higher School for Women in Odessa in 1915. She received her doctorate in mathematics from the Moscow State University, where she was already teaching. Janovskaja devoted her research to the philosophy of logic and mathematics, but her ongoing interest was the actual history of mathematics, a subject in which she excelled and published several important papers. In 1951, Janovskaja was awarded the Order of Lenin and eight years later, she headed the new Department of Mathematical Logic at Moscow State University. She died in Moscow in 1966.