Kovalevsky, Sonya or Sophie, 1850-91, Russian mathematician. She studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin (under K. T. Weierstrass) and in 1874 received a Ph.D. in absentia from the Univ. of Göttingen for her remarkable thesis on partial differential equations. From 1884 she taught at the Univ. of Stockholm. In 1888 she won the Bordin Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for a memoir on the rotation of a solid body about a fixed point. Her childhood reminiscences, published in 1890, were translated as Sonya Kovalevsky: Her Recollections of Childhood (1895), with a biographical study by Anna Leffler Edgren.

Sonya, pronounced SOHN-yah or SAWN-yah, is a popular feminine given name. Sonya and its variations are occasionally found as surnames in England and the American eastern seaboard.

First Name

The feminine first name Sonya derives from the Greek name Sophia, which is also the Greek word for wisdom. Sonya was originally a Russian form of Sophia, but it is now also widely used in English speaking countries.

The name appears in multiple languages including English, Bulgarian, Russian, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Hungarian, German, Scandinavian, Finnish, Slovene, Serbian and Indian.

Sonya has many variant spellings and related name forms, among them Sohnia, Sohnnja, Sondja, Sondya, Sonja, Sonje, Sonni, Sonnie, Sonnja, and Sonia. Sonya is variant of Sophia (Greek) which has 18 variant forms: Saffi, Sofia, Sofie, Soficita, Sofka, Sofy, Sofya, Sonia, Sonja, Sonnie, Sonya, Sophey, Sophie, Sophy, Zofia, Zofi, Zofya, and Zosia.

Sonya is a popular female first name, ranking 339 out of 4,275 for females of all ages listed in the 1990 U.S. Census.

Last Name

Sonya is a rare surname as it was not ranked for people of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census. The spelling Sonya is of English descent. Spelling variations include: Sonning, Sonnin, Sonin, Soning, Sunning, Sunin, Souning, Sounin, Sonninges, Somin, Somings, and many more. The surname Sonya was first located in Berkshire where they were anciently seated as Lords of the Manor. Some of the first American settlers named Sonya or some of its variants migrated in the mid-17th century to the eastern seaboard. Migrants eventually settled in Newfoundland, Maine, Virginia, The Carolinas, and the islands.