Mary Somerville (née Fairfax, formerly Greig; 1780–1872) 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, which she signed before the age of 86.
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". The first use of the word "scientist" in the English language was in a review by William Whewell of Somerville's second book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Beyond her work as a scientist, she is known and celebrated as a mathematician and philosopher.
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. She is featured on the front of the Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note launched in 2017 along with a quotation from On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences.
Contents
Early life and education
Somerville, the daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir William George Fairfax, was related to several prominent Scottish houses through her mother, Margaret Charters. She was born on 26 December 1780 at the manse of Jedburgh, the home of her maternal aunt and the Rev. Dr. Thomas Somerville (1741–1830) (author of My Own Life and Times). Her childhood home was at Burntisland, Fife, where her mother was from.
Somerville was the second of four surviving children (three of her siblings had died in infancy). She was particularly close to her oldest brother Sam. The family lived in genteel poverty as her father's naval pay remained meagre, despite his rise through the ranks. Her mother supplemented the household's income by growing vegetables, maintaining an orchard and keeping cows for milk. Her mother taught her to read the Bible and Calvinist catechisms. When her household chores were done, Mary was free to roam among the birds and flowers in the garden.
In her autobiography, Somerville recollects that on her father's return from sea he said to his wife, "This kind of life will never do, Mary must at least know how to write and keep accounts". Ten-year-old Mary was then sent to an expensive boarding school in Musselburgh, where she learned the first principles of writing, rudimentary French and English grammar. Upon returning home, she:
...was no longer amused in the gardens, but wandered about the country. When the tide was out I spent hours on the sands, looking at the star-fish and sea-urchins, or watching the children digging for sand-eels, cockles, and the spouting razor-fish. I made collections of shells, such as were cast ashore, some so small that they appeared like white specks in patches of black sand. There was a small pier on the sands for shipping limestone brought from the coal mines inland. I was astonished to see the surface of these blocks of stone covered with beautiful impressions of what seemed to be leaves; how they got there I could not imagine, but I picked up the broken bits, and even large pieces, and brought them to my repository.
During bad weather, Somerville occupied herself with reading the books in her father's library, including Shakespeare, as well as with "domestic duties." Such duties "occupied a great part of my time; besides, I had to shew my sampler, working the alphabet from A to Z, as well as the ten numbers, on canvas". Her aunt Janet came to live with the family and reportedly said to her mother "I wonder you let Mary waste her time in reading, she never shews [sews] more than if she were a man." Somerville was then sent to the village school to learn plain needlework, where she found herself annoyed that her "turn for reading was so much disapproved of, and thought it unjust that women should have been given a desire for knowledge if it were wrong to acquire it." The village school master came several time each week to teach Mary at home. In her Personal Recollections, Somerville notes that the boys learned Latin at the village school, while "it was thought sufficient for the girls to be able to read the Bible; very few even learnt writing."
Marriage and studies
In 1804, Somerville met her first husband, Lieutenant Samuel Greig. Her distant cousin, a son of Admiral Samuel Greig, he was commissioner of the Russian navy and Russian consul for Britain. They married and had two children, one of whom, Woronzow Greig, would become a barrister and scientist. They lived in London, but it was not a happy time for Somerville. Her husband did not think much of women's intellectual capacity. Indeed, Greig "possessed in full the prejudice against learned women which was common at that time." Instead, Somerville took lessons in French, which was considered more appropriate. When her husband died in 1807 she was still nursing their youngest child and she returned to Scotland.
Her inheritance from Greig gave her the freedom to pursue intellectual interests. By that time, she had studied plane and spherical trigonometry, conic sections and James Ferguson's Astronomy. Somerville also read Isaac Newton's Principia. John Playfair, professor of natural philosophy at University of Edinburgh, encouraged her studies and through him she began a correspondence with William Wallace, with whom she discussed mathematical problems.
Somerville began solving mathematical problems posed in the mathematical journal of the Military College at Marlow and eventually made a name for herself after solving a diophantine problem, for which she was awarded a silver medal in 1811. Somerville published five solutions in Volumes 3 and 4 of the Mathematical Repository under the pseudonym 'A Lady'. Two of her solutions demonstrated her early adoption of differential calculus—her contribution to the circulation and visibility of calculus in early 19th-century Britain.
Wallace suggested that she study the writings of French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, which summarised the theory of gravity and collected the mathematical results established in the 50 years since Principia had been published. Somerville said that studying Laplace's work gave her the confidence to persevere in her mathematical studies. She extended her studies to astronomy, chemistry, geography, microscopy, electricity and magnetism. At the age of 33 she bought herself a library of scientific books. These included Louis-Benjamin Francœur's Elements of Mechanics, Sylvestre François Lacroix' Algebra and Calculus Treatise, Jean-Baptiste Biot's Analytical Geometry and Astronomy, Siméon Denis Poisson's Treatise on Mechanics, Joseph-Louis Lagrange's Theory of Analytical Functions, Leonhard Euler's Elements of Algebra and Isoperimetrical Problems, Alexis Clairaut's Figure of the Earth, Gaspard Monge's Application of Analysis to Geometry, and François Callet's Logarithmus.
Science practice and writing
Somerville conducted experiments to explore the relationship between light and magnetism. Her first paper, "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum", was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1826. Although her conclusions were faulty, the topic was of popular interest at the time and the paper brought her to notice in scientific circles. Using a sample of silver nitrate supplied by Michael Faraday, Somerville conducted experiments on the blackening effect of sunlight, the reaction used in early experiments in photography. She later developed her technique by using an optical prism and vegetable dyes, producing an early version of the optical spectrometer. Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, wrote in 1829 that Mary Somerville was "certainly the most extraordinary woman in Europe – a mathematician of the very first rank with all the gentleness of a woman".
Lord Brougham asked Somerville 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. Mécanique Céleste was acclaimed as the greatest intellectual achievement since the Principia. Somerville produced not just a translation, but also 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, and it immediately made her famous. Until the 1880s Mechanism was set as a textbook for undergraduates at the University of Cambridge.
After receiving a copy of Mechanism, Joanna Baillie wrote to Somerville, "I feel myself greatly honoured by receiving such a mark of regard from one who has done more to remove the light estimation in which the capacity of women is too often held than all that has been accomplished by the whole Sisterhood of Poetical Damsels & novel-writing Authors." The book was praised by George Peacock, Professor of the University of Cambridge, thus many of the 750 copies printed were bought in Cambridge. Reviews were favourable and Somerville received letters of congratulation from "many men of science". She was elected honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, 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.
Death
From 1833 onwards, Somerville and her husband spent most of their time in Italy. Somerville maintained correspondence with a large number of leading scientists and remained engaged in current debates on facts and theories.
In 1868, four years before her death a month before her 92nd birthday, she was the first person to sign John Stuart Mill's unsuccessful petition for female suffrage. In her autobiography, Somerville wrote that "British laws are adverse to women". She detailed the obstacles she had faced in obtaining an education as a young girl, though she did not speculate on the nature of the problem. During her lifetime, agitation had grown for women's access to higher education. In 1875, astronomer Maria Mitchell was told by a college president that he "would hire a woman scientist if she was as good as Mary Somerville".
Somerville died at Naples on 29 November 1872, and was buried there in the English Cemetery.
Legacy
In the year following Somerville's death, her autobiographical Personal Recollections was published, consisting of reminiscences written during her old age. Over 10,000 pages are in the Somerville Collection of the Bodleian Library and Somerville College, Oxford. The collection includes papers relating to her writing and published work, and correspondence with family members, scientists and writers, as well as other figures in public life. Also included is substantial correspondence with the Byron and Lovelace families.
Her shell collection was given to Somerville College, Oxford by her descendants.
Somerville Square in Burntisland is named after her family and marks the site of their home.
Somerville College, Oxford, was named after Somerville, as are Somerville House, Burntisland, where she lived for a time, and Somerville House, a high school for girls in Brisbane, Australia. One of the Committee Rooms of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh has been named after her.
Somerville Island (74°44′N 96°10′W), a small island in Barrow Strait, Nunavut, was named after her by Sir William Edward Parry in 1819.
The Somerville Club was founded in 1878 in London, by 1887 it was re-established as the New Somerville Club, and it disappeared by 1908.
The vessel Mary Somerville was launched in 1835 at Liverpool. She traded with India for Taylor, Potter & Co., of Liverpool, and disappeared with the loss of all aboard in late 1852 or early 1853.
Mary Somerville is featured in miniature in The English Bijou Almanack, 1837, with poetry by Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
5771 Somerville (1987 ST1) is a main-belt asteroid discovered on 21 September 1987 by E. Bowell at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and named after her. Somerville crater is a small lunar crater in the eastern part of the Moon. It lies to the east of the prominent crater Langrenus. It is one of a handful of lunar craters named after women.
Children
From her first marriage she had a son, Woronzow Greig (1805–1865), named after Count Semyon Vorontsov, the Russian ambassador in London who had appointed Samuel Greig as his Consul General. Woronzow married Agnes Graham but all their children died at birth or in infancy.
From her second marriage she had three daughters and one son: Margaret Farquhar Somerville (1813–1823; died in childhood), Thomas Somerville (1814–1815; died in infancy), Martha Charters Somerville (1815–1879) and Mary Charlotte Somerville (1817–1875). Her two surviving daughters spent most of their lives caring for Mary.