Klavdiya Yakovlevna Latysheva was born in Kiev on 14 March 1897 in a military family. She completed her high school in 1916, and obtained a degree from the Physico-Mathematical division of the Kiev higher women's educational institution in 1921. The rest of her education and career was at the University of Kiev. From 1925 to 1928, she was in postgraduate studies, working on finding solutions to differential and integral equations using Mikhail Kravchuk's method of moments. Kravchuk was her doctoral adviser. She was the first Ukrainian woman to obtain a doctorate in the mathematical and physical sciences, with her dissertation on approximate solutions to linear differential equations with singular coefficients. Latysheva was an organiser of the first All-Ukrainian Mathematical Olympiad in 1936. During the Second World War, Latysheva transferred to Saratov. She worked at the automotive and highway faculty of the Saratov State Technical University. In 1946, she established a scientific group in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of University of Kiev to study the analytical theory of differential equations. Between 1953 and 1956, Latysheva headed this group. She was the dean of the Faculty between 1952 and 1954. For her contributions to mathematics, she was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1954, as well as the Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945". Latysheva died on 11 May 1956, and was interred in the Lukyanovsk cemetery in Kiev.
Scientific work
Latysheva developed an effective method for the construction of solutions of linear ordinary differential equations around regular and irregular points by expanding on Poincaré's concept of rank and L. Tome's concept of anti-rank. This is now known as the Frobenius-Latysheva method. As part of this work, she determined a new type of normal and normal-regular solutions, and provided necessary and sufficient conditions for their existence. This was a major contribution, providing for the existence of closed-form solutions of linear differential equations with polynomial coefficients. A series of twelve articles, published between 1946–1952, established the full results, and also simplified and extended related theorems in the analytic theory of differential equations by Poincaré, Cayley and others.
