Entry № 9854 · Russian origin

Sofya Sofya — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ SOH-fyah /
Gender
Girl
Origin
Russian
Meaning
"Wisdom (Sofya Kovalevskaya, first female PhD in math)"
Syllables
2
First recorded
Modern (Russian)

A name that means "wisdom (sofya kovalevskaya, first female phd in math)".

Sofya is the Russian form of Sophia — from Greek sophia (wisdom). Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) was the first woman in modern Europe to earn a PhD in mathematics (Göttingen, 1874, summa cum laude) — and the first woman appointed a full professor of mathematics (Stockholm, 1889). Her Kovalevskaya top is one of only three integrable cases of the spinning top, alongside Euler and Lagrange. Also a novelist and playwright. Died of pneumonia at 41.

Subject of Don H. Kennedy's Little Sparrow (1983).

Wisdom (Sofya Kovalevskaya, first female PhD in math) — a Russian name.

The name in its native script.

Софья
Transliteration
Sof'ya
Pronunciation
/ ˈsoʊ.fjə /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Sofya stands.

Sofya does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.

Sofyas before her.

Real people
Sofya Kovalevskaya
Russian mathematician.
1850 – 1891
In fiction
Sofya
Subject of A Russian Childhood.
1889

Names connected to Sofya.

The number behind Sofya.

3

The Communicator

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Sofya reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.