Debating skulls, brains, geniuses and degenerations: Sofja Kovalevskaya's legacy in the discussions of Paul Julius Möbius with Gustaf Retzius and Otto Weininger on mathematical talent and female genius

This article examines the posthumous reception of Sofya Kovalevskaya to explore how female genius was negotiated around 1900 at the intersection of neurology, sexology, biography, and scientific culture. Rather than reconstructing the historical Kovalevskaya, it analyses the discursively produced figure that emerged after her death. It begins with the dispute between Paul Julius Möbius and Gustaf Retzius over the localisation of mathematical talent, in which Kovalevskaya's preserved brain became evidence in competing claims about cerebral function and scientific authority. The article then contrasts degeneration theory, concepts of sexual intermediacy, and Otto Weininger's masculinised conception of genius. Read alongside biographies by Anna Charlotte Leffler and Laura Marholm, these debates reveal the unstable ways female scientific genius could be acknowledged within a discourse that continued to code originality and authorship as masculine.