Back ماري سمرفيل Arabic Mary Somerville AST Meri Somervill Azerbaijani ماری سومروایل AZB Mary Somerville BCL Мери Самървил Bulgarian মেরি সোমারভিল Bengali/Bangla Mary Somerville Catalan Mary Somerville Czech Mary Somerville Welsh
Mary Somerville | |
|---|---|
 Painting 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/; 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.
When John Stuart Mill organized a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he made sure that the first signature on the petition would be Somerville's.
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".[2][3] One of the earliest uses of the word scientist was in a review by William Whewell of Somerville's second book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences.[4] However, the word was not used to describe Somerville herself; she was known and celebrated as a mathematician or a philosopher.[5]
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.[6] 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.[7]
- ^ "Mary Somerville | Biography, Writings, & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica.
- ^ 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 or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ 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.
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