Mary Fairfax Somerville

(1780 – 1872)

Mary Fairfax Somerville was born in Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, Scotland on December 26, 1780. Somerville’s father, Vice-Admiral Sir William George Fairfax, and her mother, Margaret Charters, were descendants of ancient and distinguished families. Though an officer of the Royal Navy, Somerville’s father could scarcely support his wife and four children; nevertheless, the Fairfaxes were proud of their lineage and lived with dignity despite their poverty.

As was customary among prominent Scottish families, Somerville’s two brothers attended excellent schools and universities. Somerville and her younger sister were not as fortunate. Their parents, like most others of their time, saw no need to educate their daughters. For women, a smattering of social graces and domestic skills, and literacy enough to read the Bible, were considered adequate. When Somerville was first sent to school at the age of ten, she was barely able to read and write, and had no knowledge of arithmetic.

The fashionable boarding school in which she was enrolled was an inauspicious introduction to formal education. Like her classmates, Somerville was forced to wear a steel cage that encircled her body from her waist to her chin. In this restrictive structure, she prepared her often pointless lessons and endured the school’s harsh discipline. For Somerville, who had freely wandered the moors and seacoast near her home, school was nothing less than torture.

An academic failure, Somerville returned to Jedburgh after one year at school. To alleviate her boredom, she taught herself to read Latin and later, to play the piano. At night, she sat in her window and studied the stars.

A women’s fashion magazine was Somerville’s improbable introduction to algebra. The periodical included a series of algebraic equations, printed without explanation. Somerville was unable to understand the significance of what she read, but her interest was piqued. She learned the fundamentals of mathematics by sewing in a corner while a tutor taught her younger brother. As Somerville stitched, she listened. Because women were forbidden by custom to purchase textbooks, Somerville persuaded the tutor to buy them for her. Among her acquisitions was Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, which she mastered by studying each night as her parents slept.

Somerville’s parents were appalled when at last they discovered her secret. What Somerville had done was considered so aberrant that her parents feared for her sanity. As she later wrote in her memoirs, “My father … said to my mother, ‘Peg, we must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a straight-jacket one of these days.’”

Not until the death in 1807 of Samuel Greig, her husband of three years, was Somerville free to pursue her intellectual interests. Because she now controlled his sizable estate, she was able to study mathematics and astronomy without reprisal, though not without reproach. As she explained,

“I was considered eccentric and foolish, and my conduct was highly disapproved by many, especially by some members of my own family. They expected me to entertain and keep a gay house for them, and in that they were disappointed. As I was quite independent, I did not care for their criticism. A great part of the day I was occupied with my children; in the evening I worked.”

In 1812, Somerville was married to a surgeon, William Somerville. In her husband, she found a man who encouraged her endeavors. When his sister urged Somerville to “give up her foolish manner of life and make a respectable and useful wife,” William retorted so angrily on Somerville’s behalf that no one in his family ever dared to criticize her again.

Through William, Somerville met many of the leading scientists of her day, including Pierre Laplace and William Herschel. These men, among others, enhanced her understanding of calculus and astronomy, and were in turn astonished by her comprehension.

In 1826, at the age of forty-five, Somerville presented a paper, “The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum,” to the Royal Society. Shortly thereafter, she was asked by Lord Brougham, of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, to write a commentary on Laplace’s Mécanique celeste. Somerville agreed, but with trepidation. She insisted that her efforts be kept secret, and her manuscript destroyed should she fail.

She need not have worried. The Mechanism of the Heavens was a great success, and is reported to have been acclaimed by Laplace himself. Her popularization of Laplace’s very difficult treatise introduced English scholars to the discoveries of continental scientists, and ended the insularity that originated from the Newton/Leibniz controversy. For nearly a century after their initial publication, Somerville’s original work and her later companion volume, A Preliminary Dissertation on the Mechanism of the Heavens, were required reading in English universities.

Her reputation as a scientist of merit thus firmly established, Somerville published two additional books, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences and Physical Geography. These works met with even greater acclaim than had her first. In 1835, she and Caroline Herschel were the first women to be elected to membership in the Royal Astronomical Society, and Somerville was granted a civil pension by the British Crown.

Somerville’s pleasure in these professional accomplishments was dimmed by the deaths of three of her four children and the failing health of her beloved husband. The Somervilles left England for the warmer climate of southern Italy, but the move had no effect on William’s vitality. His death in 1865, when Somerville was eighty-one years old, left her lonely and distraught. Eventually she found some consolation in her work; Somerville’s final treatise, Molecular and Microscopic Science, was published when she was eighty-nine.

One of Somerville’s interests in her later years was the emancipation of women. Oxford University recognized her advocacy of higher education for women by naming Somerville College, one of its five women’s colleges, in her honor. In accord with her feminists convictions, Somerville accepted John Stuart Mill’s invitation to be the first to sign his historic petition to Parliament for women’s suffrage.

Somerville died in Naples, Italy on November 29, 1872, less that a month before her ninety second birthday.

Links

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Somerville.html
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/somer.htm

References

• Burton, David M. The History of Mathematics. 2d ed. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1988.
• Eves, Howard. An Introduction to the History of Mathematics. 6th ed. Fort Worth: Saunders College Publishing, 1992.
• Gillispie, Charles Coulston, ed. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. XII. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.
• Osen, Lynn M. Women in Mathematics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1974.
• Perl, Teri. Math Equals: Biographies of Women Mathematicians + Related Activities. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1978.