Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva

Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (; 1793–1850) was the mother of Dmitri Mendeleev.

Early life Mendeleeva came from a well-known family of Siberian merchants. They were the founders of the first Siberian printing house who traced their ancestry to Yakov Korniliev, a wealthy 17th-century posad merchant.

Maria Mendeleeva's mother died birthing her, and so she was raised by her nanny. She was not allowed to go to school due to sexism, and instead learned by herself from the work that her brother, Vasily Dmitrievich, brought home from his lessons and from her father's large collection of books.

Maria birthed 17 children, of whom "only 14 stayed alive to be baptized" according to her son Pavel. She encouraged all of her children to read, calling books, "the gift of words on paper". In 1834, the same year that Maria's youngest child, Dmitri was born, Ivan became blind due to cataracts and unable to work. After Ivan Mendeleev's death from tuberculosis in 1847, the large family lived Maria's income from managing the factory. Later Dmitri would recall: "There, at the glass factory managed by my mother, I received my first impressions of nature, people, and industrial affairs.

A sketch of Maria Mendeleev by A. I. Mendeleeva, from the Family Chronicle in Letters (available on wikimedia commons)In 1848, the factory burned down. Maria persisted, and moved with her children to Saint Petersburg, an arduous 700km trip by horse and cart.

Legacy Dmitri was eventually able to receive a full education at Saint Petersburg State University and would go on to formulate the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements among other achievements. His mother's influence on his life and success was clear to him as he wrote in the dedication to his first major work, "The study of aqueous solutions by specific gravity":

In another introduction, he wrote: