Mary Somerville: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Mary Somerville (née Fairfax, formerly Greig; 1780–1872) 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.

In John Stuart Mill's 1866 mass petition to the UK Parliament to grant women the right to vote, the first signature on the petition was Somerville's, which she signed before the age of 86.

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". The first use of the word "scientist" in the English language was in a review by William Whewell of Somerville's second book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Beyond her work as a scientist, she is known and celebrated as a mathematician and philosopher.

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. She is featured on the front of the Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note launched in 2017 along with a quotation from On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences.