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| Mary Somerville, linocut print 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2019 |
The great mathematician, writer and polymath, Mary Fairfax Somerville
(1780-1872) was allowed "to grow up a wild creature," roaming in
nature, wading in the sea, watching birds, collecting eggs, starfish,
shells, seaweed and flowers or watching whales, with her older brother
Sam when he was home from school but otherwise on her own. Second of
four surviving children of Vice-Admiral Sir William George Fairfax and
his second wife, Margaret Charters, the young Mary Fairfax grew up in
the Scottish Borders. Though well-respected and highly ranked, her
father's income was quite meagre and her pragmatic mother helped feed
the family and supplement income growing vegetables, fruit and keeping
cows for milk. Her easygoing if busy mother did teach her to read the
Bible and Calvinist catechisms, but she was left largely to her own
devices. Though her father was a Tory, she was liberal-minded and felt
the French populace justified to revolt; she and her brother also
refused sugar in their tea to protest the institution of slavery. She
later wrote that she "resented the injustice of the world in denying all
those privileges of education to my sex which were so lavishly
bestowed on men." Her father returned from sea when she was 10 and
declared that running wild wouldn't do and she was sent for a year of
tuition at Musselburgh, an expensive boarding school where she learned writing, grammar and some French. When released she "felt like a wild animal escaped from a cage."
After
her year of schooling she did spend a lot of time reading, or
resentfully working on a sampler, stitching letters and numbers. Her
aunt Janet disapproved of her reading and neglecting her poor sewing
skills and she was sent to the village school for needlework lessons.
The village school master began to visit in the evenings and teacher a
bit more including how to use a globe. When she was 13 she was sent to
writing school in Edinburgh during the winter months, where she finally learned
arithmetic. She taught herself enough Latin to read books in their
home. She confessed this to her favourite uncle Dr. Thomas Somerville,
the adult in her life who didn't discourage her pursuit of ideas and
learning. He told her women had been scholars even in ancient times and
read her Virgil to help her learn more Latin. She went to visit her
uncle William Charters, in Edinburgh, where she was sent to dancing
school to learn manners and to curtsey. She also met the Lyell family,
befriending Charles, who would go on to revolutionize geology.
Mary
stumbled upon mathematics unexpectedly. A young woman, whom she met
when dragged to a tea party by her mother, invited her to come see her
needlework and showed her a ladies' magazine with puzzles. Mary was
fascinated by the mathematical puzzles and solutions the magazine
published. Her new friend could only tell her these were called algebra.
She sought books at home to help her decipher this but she only found a
book on navigation. It did not help with algebra, but she was
introduced to trigonometry and learned there was more to astronomy than stargazing. She asked her younger brother's tutor to buy her an algebra textbook and Euclid's
Elements,
and soon she was staying up late to read these after chores. But she
ran through too many candles and her parents put a stop to this, fearing
for her sanity; they like many contemporaries felt that higher learning
was unnatural in a woman. She continued to study in secret.
Nicknamed "the Rose of Jedburgh"
among Edinburgh socialites, her expected role was to marry and so she
did. She married her distant cousin Samuel Grieg, a commissioner in the
Russian navy and London-based Russian consul. They were not a good
match. He held a low opinion of the abilities of women and no interest
in science. Left largely alone, she began to study French and more
mathematics. She was widowed within three years and left with her young
toddler son Woronzow, a baby, and a small inheritance. She returned to live her parents, more independent now as a widow.
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| Laplace's Demon, by Ele Willoughby 2011 |
She had studied plane and spherical trigonometry,
conic sections and James Ferguson's
Astronomy. Despite her children and household chores she ambitiously tried to read Newton's
Principia. She met intellectuals like
Lord Henry Brougham, and the renown Professor of mathematics and natural history,
John Playfair who encouraged her mathematical studies and introduced her to mathematician and astronomer
William Wallace.
She corresponded with Wallace about her mathematical problems. She made
a name for herself when she was awarded a silver medal in 1811 by
solving a mathematical problem posed in the mathematical journal of the
Military College at Marlow. Wallace suggested she read mathematician
Pierre-Simon Laplace on gravity and all physics in the decades since the
Principia first appeared in 1687. Finding she understood Laplace's five-volume
Mécanique Céleste (
Celestial Mechanics)
as well as the tutor she hired, her confidence increased, and she
expanded her studies to astronomy, chemistry, geography, microscopy,
electricity and magnetism, buying a "excellent little library" of math
and science books at the age of 33. She began to see that English
mathematics, dominated by Newton, had stagnated and fallen behind their
continental colleagues, by not adopting Leibnizian calculus.
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Ada, Countess Lovelace, linocut by Ele Willoughby.
Ada is shown with Babbage's diagrams of his Difference Engine
and the equations for Bernouilli Numbers, which she showed
how to calculate mechanically in the world's first
computer program. |
She was much luckier in her second marriage in 1812, to another cousin, Dr
William Somerville
(1771–1860). He was inspector of the Army Medical Board, and the son of
her favourite aunt and uncle. Elected a member of the Royal Society,
William Somerville
socialized with leading intellectuals, scientists and writers of the
day and was a devoted supporter of Mary's studies. She returned to
reading Laplace and Newton after their honeymoon. The family (including
William's illegitimate son who became close with Woronzow)
moved to Hanover Square into a government house in Chelsea when William
was appointed to the Chelsea Hospital in 1819. Her marriage was a very
happy one, though they had a disastrous financial loss (the trusting
William acted as guarantor for a relative's
loan) and were devastated by the early death of three of Mary's six
children; her second son from her first marriage died at nine, her first
son with William died as a baby, and their first daughter Margaret died
at ten. Woronzow, and their daughters Martha and Mary survived.
Wallace introduced the Somervilles to astronomer
F. William Herschel who discovered Uranus and worked with his sister
Caroline, who discovered many comets and more. He showed them his huge reflecting telescope and his son, mathematician and polymath
John Herschel became one of Mary's mentors, though ten years her junior. The Somervilles we popular and met "nothing but kindness" in scientific circles. They met many including philosopher
William Wollaston, and physicists
Thomas Young and
Michael Faraday. Mary become friends with mathematician
Anne Isabella Milbanke, Baroness Wentworth, and mathematics tutor to her daughter,
Ada Lovelace. She frequently visited polymath and inventor
Charles Babbage,
viewed his Calculating-machines and introduced him to Lovelace. She and
Lovelace became close friends, discussing mathematics problems over
tea. The couple travelled frequently to Europe, and like in London, met
with the scientists and intellectuals of the day on their travels. On
the continent they met polymath
François Arago, physicist
Jean-Baptiste Biot, mathematician
Siméon Denis Poisson, and
Laplace himself.
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Maxwell's Demon, linocut
by Ele Willoughby |
Mary began experimenting and published her
first paper on "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar
spectrum", in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1826. Her
results were praised and reproduced by others but ultimately shown to be
incorrect, which crushed her confidence in performing her own
experiments. The truth is that finding small errors in experimental
design and correcting and improving them is part of the normal process
of science. She was the first woman to publish scientific results under
her own name. Had she not been a woman and an outsider, she might have
realized she had no reason to feel embarrassed. In 1829, Sir
David Brewster, inventor of the
kaleidoscope, wrote that Mary Somerville
was "certainly the most extraordinary woman in Europe - a
mathematician of the very first rank with all the gentleness of a
woman".
Meanwhile, her acquaintance Lord Brougham asked her to translate Laplace's
Mécanique Céleste into English for the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. He
even visited her in person to try and persuade her. She agreed on the
condition she could work in secret and that it could be more technical
than he had intended, for she felt the need to introduce the British
public to Leibnizian
calculus so they could understand Laplace. This became a labour of
love, not just a translation, but an expanded version explaining all the
mathematics of gravity and celestial mechanics that Laplace assumed the
reader should intuit, and additional pertinent topics, under the title
of
The Mechanism of the Heavens.
It took her three years. Brougham refused to publish it, deeming it too
technical for his audience. William was determined her work would not
go to waste and he brought the book to their friend geologist Charles
Lyell's publisher John Murray. Murray eventually agreed to publish it
(after John Herschel reviewed the manuscript and found it virtually
flawless) in 1831, when Mary was 50. It sold well, made her famous and
became the standard textbook for undergraduates at University of
Cambridge until the 1880s. As Mary had been denied access to a
university education as a woman this was very gratifying. In France, her
book was so well received that Biot wrote to her to say colleagues were pestering him to hurry up his review of the book for the
Journal des Savants. The next year when they travelled to Paris they were celebrated and made new scientific friends including physicist
André-Marie Ampère and
Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier Rumford (widow of and assistant to the famous chemist Antoine, and now also widow of the physicist Count Rumford). Mary Somerville was elected an honourary
member of the Royal Astronomical Society along with Caroline Herschel.
They were first two women admitted in any way, even if only honourary
members of the society. She was also elected honorary member of the
Royal Irish Academy, of the Bristol Philosophical Institution and the
Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève
in 1834 and the British Crown granted her a pension of £200 a year for
her contributions to science and literature. The pension was very
timely, as the Somervilles'
financial problems meant they quietly relied on the extra income she
was able to earn (something not deemed appropriate for a middle class
woman).
Her next book
On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences
(1834) was even grander in scope, connecting and summarizing the
physical sciences of physics and astronomy with geography and
meteorology. This book sold 15,000 copies establishing her reputation as
amongst the elite of scientific authors. It was her publisher John
Murray's most successful science book until Darwin published
The Origin of Species
in 1859. The book went through nine editions and she updated it for the
rest of her life, even pointing out in the third edition that the
challenges in calculating the position of Uranus hinted at the existence
of further possible undiscovered planets. She wrote that perhaps even
the mass and orbit of this hypothetical planet could be deduced from
observations of Uranus. Somerville's insight inspired British astronomer
John Couch Adams who was able to mathematically predict the existence of Neptune in 1846. In his review of
Connexion, polymath
William Whewell
introduced a new term he coined: 'scientist.' Many claim he praised her
as the first scientist, but in fact he thought she was superior to his
utilitarian designation, a "real person of science," a proper natural
philosopher and a great writer in contrast with other popularizers of science.
Though
she had many male scientist friends and mentors, as a woman she was
usually barred from scientific societies. Her husband presented her
papers to the Royal Society on her behalf, as did John Herschel. Their
friend Arago
presented her results on light and chemistry to the French Academy of
Science. Faraday praised her explanations of his work, which was cutting
edge research at the time of the publication of
Connexion. Throughout
her career, she had great instincts and open-mindedness about new
ideas. She supported her friend Thomas Young's controversial wave theory
of light, a real paradigm shift. Young explained his famous double-slit
experiment by building on his French friend
Augustin-Jean Fresnel's explanation of the diffraction of light in terms of waves and
Christian Huygen's idea of the propagation of wavefronts of light, at a time when Biot and Laplace were still expounding on the particle nature of light.
Likewise, she hinted at the
revolution to come with the next generation of physicists who showed how seemingly
disparate forces could be combined.
Mary
wrote, "Various circumstances render it more than probable that, like
light and heat, [electricity] is a modification or vibration of that
subtle ethereal medium, which, in a highly elastic state, pervades all
space," which inspired the subsequent investigations by Hans Christian Ørsted
(also written Oersted) and Michael Faraday. Mary noted that mariners
observe lightening affects compasses. She described American John
Henry's electromagnet, able to hold a ton of metal. And she traced the
history of electrical and magnetic investigations since Coulomb. Later, the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell who combined the forces of electricity and magnetism in his laws for light, cited Somerville's book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences
for its hints of connections between light and magnetism, electricity
and light, colour, electricity and magnetism and heat. He praised her
insight and took the time to carefully explain why her experiment
using violet light to magnetize a needle had failed. Mary may not have
succeeded in establishing the connection between light and magnetism,
but in searching for it she was on the vanguard of contemporary
research.
In 1848 she published her most popular book,
Physical Geography,
which was the first textbook on the subject in English. It went through
six editions in her lifetime, was used until the early 20th century and
won her the Victoria Gold Medal of the
Royal Geographical Society in 1869.
Physical Geography
was influential, ignoring political divisions and viewing humanity as a
part of nature, but a part able to affect its environment, emphasizing
interconnectedness and interdependencies. While she was working on this book, she was initially discouraged by German naturalist
Alexander von Humboldt’s publication of his first volume of
Kosmos
(1845), which covered similar subject matter but John Hershel
encouraged her to continue and as she wrote, follow "the noble example
of
Baron Humboldt,
the patriarch of physical geography." She takes her readers through the
place of the Earth in the solar system, its structure, features of land
and water, formation of mountains, volcanoes, oceans, lakes and rivers,
and what impacts temperature, electricity, magnetism and the auroras
before turning to the distribution of life. Impressed, Humboldt himself
wrote to her, "You alone could provide your literature with an original
cosmological work." Her book also precipitated some backlash because her
discussion of geology contradicted the biblical estimate of the age of
the Earth, but she wrote, "facts are such stubborn things." Four years
later, the Somerville family,
Mary and William and their daughters Martha and Mary, moved to Italy
for health reasons and because the cost of living was lower.
William Somerville died at 89 in 1860 and then her son Woronzow died suddenly, at age 60, in 1865, sending Mary into a deep grieving period. So when Maxwell published his theory of electromagnetism in 1865, Mary was preoccupied with grieving and took little notice of this monumental work she helped presage and inspire. Now in her 80s, she began work on her memoir.
Mary had always put her fame and scientific
credibility to work to support causes she believed in, including women’s
suffrage, arguing that science was too often used for military purposes, the antivivisection
movement and drawing attention to the way human activity was causing animal
extinctions.
A lifelong lover of birds, she had a pet mountain sparrow which would
sleep on her arm as she wrote. She noted the decline in "feathered
tribes" of Europe who would be "avenged by the insects." In 1866 when
philosopher and economist
John Stuart Mill organized a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he asked Mary Somerville
to be the first to sign. She was a member of the General Committee for
Woman Suffrage in London, and petitioned London University
unsuccessfully to grant degrees to women (noting that in France, Emma Chenu had been granted an MA in mathematics and a Russian lady, likely Sofia
Kovalevski, had also taken a degree). She viewed her final book as a mistake. Published at age 88 in 1869,
On Molecular and Microscopic Science,
a popularization of science book, it was not as well received as her
previous works, but was nonetheless sold well. She explained the latest
thinking on atoms and molecules and revealed the lifeforms discovered
with the microscope. But, she felt her time would have been better used
if devoted more purely to mathematics, and began working to catch up on
the latest mathematics research and returned to work on her 246-page
manuscript on curves and surfaces. She enjoyed her old age and was glad
to keep her faculties, work on mathematics and take an interest in
current affairs until her own death, expressing only regret that she
would not live to see results of scientific expeditions underway or the
abolition of the slave trade. She died on November 28, 1872, while
working on a mathematical paper on
Hamilton's
quaternions, approaching her 92nd birthday. Her obituary in The Morning
Post read, "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." Her daughter Martha
edited her autobiography,
Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age (1873), and it was published posthumously.
In my portrait, I've shown Somerville
with diagrams from her first two books, emphasizing the importance of
her impact on astronomy and physics, and highlighting some of the
cutting edge science she presented (like connections between electricity
and magnetism, and Young's Double Slit Experiment).
References
Mary Somerville,
Mechanism of the Heavens, London: John Murray 1831
Mary Somerville,
On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences,
London: John Murray 1834
Mary Somerville, P
ERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS FROM EARLY LIFE TO OLD AGE OF MARY SOMERVILLE WITH Selections from her Correspondence BY HER DAUGHTER, MARTHA SOMERVILLE. London: John Murray, 1874
Robyn Arianrhod, Seduced by Logic:
Émilie du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution, OUP, New York, 2012
James Secord, 'Mary Somerville's Vision of Science' Physics Today 71, 1, 46 (2018); doi: 10.1063/PT.3.3817
'Mary Somerville', Britanica, accessed November 2019
Mary Sommerville, Wikipedia, accessed November 2019
