Mary Somerville

[laudropb]

The RBS has confirmed that the astronomer and science writer Mary Fairfax Somerville (b1780,d1872) is to appear on their new £10 note to be issued in 2017. She will be the first woman, other than the Queen to appear on a Royal Bank of Scotland note.

Somerville was a Scottish Science writer and polymath and was nominated, along with Caroline Herschel to be the first women members of the RAS. Her writing influenced both James Clerk Maxwell and John Couch Adams. It was her discussion of a hypothetical planet perturbing the orbit of Uranus in the 6th edition of On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1842) which led to Adams search for Neptune.

For further reading on this remarkable lady I can recommend 2 books which are readily available on Amazon

Personal Recollections, from Early life to Old Age, written by her and daughter Martha Charles Somerville and Science Illumination and the Female Mind by Kathryn A Neeley.

[Putaendo Patrick]

A fascinating woman who well deserves to be on a ten quid note!

I am always surprised how she managed to break through and make it as a scientist (apparently the first usage of the word was to describe her!). Born in rural Scotland, she received a very basic education mainly directed towards needlework (it was through puzzles in women's magazines that she first became interested in algebra). With her first marriage to an untalented naval officer, it seemed she was pretty well doomed to domesticity. Fortunately he died after three years!

Mary Somerville became friends with Lady Byron, the then-separated wife of poet Lord Byron. Their daughter was Ada Lovelace, and it was through Somerville that Lovelace first met Charles Babbage. It is sometimes said that Babbage invented the computer and Lovelace was the first programmer!

Somerville's inspired translation of Lapace's Mechanism of the Heavens with her influential 70 page Preliminary Dissertation, first edition London 1831, can be downloaded at:

https://archive.org/details/mechanismofheave00somerich

The first American edition (I think) of her Preliminary Dissertation, Philadelphia 1832, is available on Google Books:

https://books.google.cl/books?id=STJYAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Somerville's autobiography, Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, can be found at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27747