Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath, whose groundbreaking scientific books include The Mechanism of the Heavens (1831), On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), Physical Geography (1848) and Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869). She also wrote a memoir, Personal recollections, from early life to old age, of Mary Somerville (1874).
Mary Somerville was the daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir William George Fairfax, scion of a distinguished family of Fairfaxes, and she was related to several prominent Scottish houses through her mother, the admiral’s second wife, Margaret Charters, daughter of Samuel Charters, a solicitor.
She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she was elected together with Caroline Herschel as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
When John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist, organised a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he had Somerville put her signature first on the petition.
In 1834 she became the first person to be described in print as a ‘scientist’. 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”.
Mary Somerville was married twice and had five children. She died at Naples, Italy on 29 November 1872, aged 91.
Link to Wikipedia biography