Mary Fairfax Somerville, born on this day in history in Scotland, educated herself from the time she was a child. When her aunt came to live with the family she reportedly complained to her sister, “I wonder you let Mary waste her time in reading, she never shews more than if she were a man.”
In 1804 she met her first husband, but he did not think much of women’s capacity to pursue academic interests. When he died in 1807, she resumed her studies in math, her inheritance from him having given her the freedom to pursue intellectual interests.
She studied mathematics, publishing books on differential calculus.
She started to solve mathematical problems posed in the mathematical journal of the Military College at Marlow and she eventually made a name for herself when solving a diophantine problem for which she was awarded a silver medal in 1811.
Mary Fairfax Somerville via Wikipedia
Somerville extended her studies into astronomy, chemistry, geography, microscopy, electricity and magnetism. At the age of 33 she bought herself a library of scientific books.
In 1812 she married Dr William Somerville (1771–1860), inspector of the Army Medical Board, who encouraged and greatly aided her in the study of the physical sciences. Her husband was elected to the Royal Society and together they moved in the leading social circles of the day. In her second marriage Somerville had four children.
In 1819 her husband was appointed physician to Chelsea Hospital and the family moved to Hanover Square into a government house in Chelsea. Somerville was a friend of Anne Isabella Milbanke, Baroness Wentworth, and was mathematics tutor to her daughter, Ada Lovelace. (Lovelace is often regarded as the first computer programmer.) Somerville and Lovelace maintained a close friendship throughout life and when Lovelace encountered difficulties with a mathematical calculation she would walk to Somerville’s house and discuss the matter over a cup of tea.
In the summer of 1825, Somerville carried out experiments on magnetism, and the next year was able to present her paper entitled “The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum” to the Royal Society. Aside from the astronomical observations of Caroline Herschel, it was the first paper by a woman to be read to the Royal Society and was published in its Philosophical Transactions.
Somerville was requested to translate the Mécanique Céleste of Pierre-Simon Laplace for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Laplace had, in five exhaustive volumes, summed up the current state of gravitational mathematics and Mécanique Céleste was acclaimed as the greatest intellectual achievement since Newton’s Principia. Somerville produced not just a translation, but an expanded version of the first two volumes. She wrote a standalone exposition of the mathematics behind the workings of the solar system, of which she said “I translated Laplace’s work from algebra into common language”. It was published in 1831, under the title of The Mechanism of the Heavens. It made her at once famous. Mechanism was set as a textbook for undergraduates at University of Cambridge until the 1880s.
Page 44 from Mechanism of the Heavens, via Wikipedia
Somerville was elected honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, of the Bristol Philosophical Institution and the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle de Genève in 1834. The British Crown granted her a civil pension of £200 a year in recognition of her eminence in science and literature.
Her second book, The Connection of the Physical Sciences, published in 1834, was an account of physical phenomena and the connections among the physical sciences. She and Caroline Herschel were both elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835, the first women to receive such an honor.
In 1848, at the age of sixty eight, Mary published yet another book. Physical Geography proved to be her most successful work yet and was widely used in schools and universities for the next fifty years.
Her last scientific book, Molecular and Microscopic Science was published in 1869 when Mary was eighty-nine.
She died at age 91.
Library at Somerville College, named after Mary, in Oxford, England
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