Mary Somerville
Mary Somerville | |
|---|---|
Portrait of Mary Somerville by Thomas Phillips, 1834 | |
| Born | Mary Fairfax 26 December 1780 Jedburgh, Scotland |
| Died | 29 November 1872 (aged 91) Naples, Italy |
| Resting place | English Cemetery, Naples |
| Awards | Patron's Medal (1869) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields |
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Mary Somerville (/ˈsʌmərvɪl/ SUM-ər-vil; née Fairfax, formerly Greig; 26 December 1780 – 29 November 1872)[1] was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In John Stuart Mill's 1866 mass petition to the UK Parliament to grant women the right to vote, the first signature on the petition was Somerville's,[2] which she signed before the age of 86.[3]
When she died in 1872, The Morning Post declared in her obituary that "Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science".[4][5] Somerville is the first person to be referred to as a "scientist", as the word was coined in a review by William Whewell of Somerville's second book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences.[6][7] Beyond her work as a scientist, she is known and celebrated as a mathematician and philosopher.[8]
Somerville College, a college of the University of Oxford, is named after her, reflecting the virtues of liberalism and academic success that the college wished to embody.[9] She is featured on the front of the Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note launched in 2017 along with a quotation from her work On the Connection of the Physical Sciences.[10]
- ^ "Mary Somerville | Biography, Writings, & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica. 3 May 2024.
- ^ O'Connor, J.; Robertson, E. (November 1999). "Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville". University of St. Andrews. Retrieved 22 August 2025.
- ^ Mill, John. Kinzer, Bruce L.; Robson, John M. (eds.). The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXVIII - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part I. pp. 92–93. Retrieved 22 August 2025.
- ^ Boreham, Ruth (8 March 2017). "Mary Somerville: Queen of Science". Dangerous Women. Retrieved 12 July 2018.
- ^ "Mrs. Somerville (Obituary)". The Morning Post from London. 2 December 1872.
- ^ "Whewell, William". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29200. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ Ross, Sydney (1962). "Scientist: The story of a word". Annals of Science. 18 (2): 65–85. doi:10.1080/00033796200202722. To be exact, the person coined the term scientist was referred to in Whewell 1834 only as "some ingenious gentleman." Ross added a comment that this "some ingenious gentleman" was Whewell himself, without giving the reason for the identification. Ross 1962, p.72.
- ^ Secord, James (1 January 2018). "Mary Somerville's vision of science". Physics Today. 71 (1): 46–52. Bibcode:2018PhT....71a..46S. doi:10.1063/PT.3.3817. ISSN 0031-9228.
- ^ Batson 2008, p. 23.
- ^ "Royal Bank of Scotland – £10 Polymer". www.scotbanks.org.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2019. Retrieved 19 August 2019.