At a time when science was inaccessible to women, raised to be wives and mothers, Mary Somerville was passionately dedicated to mathematical research and knowledge of scientific progress.
He was born on 26 December 1780 and grew up wandering the Scottish countryside near his home in Fifeshire, collecting shells and bird watching. Her education was limited to home instruction in mastering the typical female activities of the time: painting, music and French.
She was a restless and observant young woman, for whom she began a self-taught apprenticeship. Your uncle Thomas Somerville he supported her in her studies, seeing her interest, and began giving her Latin lessons before breakfast every day. One day, a family friend gave her a fashion magazine. On the last page she saw a puzzle with numbers mixed with letters: she was his first encounter with algebra.
Intrigued, she tried to find out more, but no one could help her. I was also learning Greek at the time and knew that the ancient Greeks were brilliant at geometry and that the best book on the subject was Euclid’s elementsso he asked to buy some books, including Euclid’s.
In 1804 he married samuel gray, naval officer, and moved to London. Two children were born and her husband died in the third year of the marriage. She found herself away from her family, but with a personal and financial independence crucial to her scientific future.
In London discovered a scientific environment which began to interest him. His good economic position facilitated the increase of his library and he decided to devote part of his time to improve his education. His first “achievement” was winning a silver medal for solving a problem on Diophantine equations in William Wallace’s Mathematical Repository.
In 1812 she married a second time to William Somerville, a medical examiner in the Royal Navy, who took pride in Somerville’s knowledge and became his chief assistant in facilitating contacts with the scientific community.
In 1834 he became the first person to be described in the press as a “scientist”. In the same year he published his analysis of the perturbations of the orbit of Uranuswhich became the origin of the research of the astronomer JOhn Couch Adams which led to the discovery of Neptune in 1846.
when in 1868 John Stuard Mill organized a mass petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote and ensured that the first signature on the petition was from Somerville.
In all of his works, Somerville developed the mathematical contributions necessary to better understand the proposed theories. His rigorous, simple and didactic style contributed to the great success of his work and to the attention of the scientific community of the nineteenth century.
Mary Somerville died in Naples on November 28, 1872 and The morning mail in his obituary he called her “the science queen of the 19th century”.
