Mary Somerville (December 26, 1780 – November 28, 1872) was a Scottishscience writer and polymath, at a time when women's participation in science was discouraged. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and was the second woman scientist to receive recognition in the United Kingdom after Caroline Herschel.
She was the daughter of Admiral Sir William George Fairfax, and was born at the manse of Jedburgh, in the Borders, the house of her mother's sister, wife of Dr Thomas Somerville (1741–1830), author of My Own Life and Times. In 1804 she married her distant cousin, the RussianConsul in London, Captain Samuel Greig, son of Admiral Samuel Greig. They had two children before Greig died in 1807, one of whom, Woronzow Greig became a barrister and scientist.[1]
After the death of her husband the inheritance gave her the freedom to pursue intellectual interests. In 1812 she married another cousin, Dr William Somerville (1771–1860), inspector of the Army Medical Board, who encouraged and greatly aided her in the study of the physical sciences. They had a further four children. After her marriage she made the acquaintance of the most eminent scientific men of the time, among whom her talents had attracted attention before she had acquired general fame, Laplace told her "There have been only three women who have understood me. These are yourself, Mrs Somerville, Caroline Herschel and a Mrs Grieg of whom I know nothing." (Of course, Somerville was first and third of these three.)
Having been requested by Lord Brougham to translate for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge the Mécanique Céleste of Laplace, she greatly popularized its form, and its publication in 1831, under the title of The Mechanism of the Heavens, at once made her famous. She stated "I translated Laplace's work from algebra into common language".
Her other works are the Connection of the Physical Sciences (1834), Physical Geography (1848), and Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869). In 1835, she and Caroline Herschel became the first women members of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1838 she and her husband went to Italy, where she spent much of the rest of her life.
Much of the popularity of her writings was due to their clear and crisp style and the underlying enthusiasm for her subject which pervaded them. In 1835 she received a pension of £300 from government. She died at Naples on November 28, 1872, and is buried there in Cimitero degli Inglesi. In the following year there appeared her autobiographical Personal Recollections, consisting of reminiscences written during her old age, and of great interest both for what they reveal of her own character and life and the glimpses they afford of the literary and scientific society of bygone times.
Somerville College, Oxford, was named after Mary Somerville, as is Sommerville House, Burntisland, where she lived for a timehttp://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Extras/Somerville_House.html. The term "scientist" was first coined by William Whewell in an 1834 review of her On the Connexion of the Sciences.
Somerville Island (54°44'N 130°17'W) http://srmwww.gov.bc.ca/bcgn-bin/bcg10?name=37356 off British Columbia near the border with Alaska was named after her by Sir William Edward Parry.
References
Bibliography
Somerville, Martha. Personal Recollections, From Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874. (written by her daughter) Reprinted by AMS Press (January 1996), ISBN 0-404-56837-8 Fully accessible from Google Books project.
Neeley, Kathryn A. Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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