Somerville, Mary
Somerville, Mary (1780–1872). Mathematician and scientist. Born into genteel poverty in Scotland, Mary Fairfax married secondly her cosmopolitan medical cousin William Somerville (1812), leaving Edinburgh for London in 1816. Largely self-taught but with zest and capacity for learning, she had developed an interest in mathematics, which William encouraged, and an informal apprenticeship under the foremost philosophers led to a long and distinguished career, since scientific society was then wide open to the talented and well connected. Her mastery of French mathematics and expositional skill made important contributions to the modernization of its English counterpart, while On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834) helped define these more precisely; if not a creative scientist like Herschel or Faraday, her books brought knowledge and clarity to a broad public. Rational but compassionate, Mary Somerville was widely accepted as the leading scientific lady in Europe, honoured accordingly, and posthumously commemorated in the foundation of Somerville College, Oxford.
A. S. Hargreaves
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Somerville, Mary
