In an era when science was perceived as a male domain, Mary Somerville (1780?1872) became both the leading woman scientist of her day and an integral part of the British scientific community. She achieved this status through careful management of her gender identity and by creating rich, readable, a[...]
These Personal Recollections contain the memoirs and a selection of the correspondence of the nineteenth-century polymath Mary Somerville (1780-1872). The book was first published in 1873, a year after Mary's death, by her daughter Martha, who wrote brief introductions to the text. Mary Somerville i[...]
Mary Somerville (1780-1872) would have been a remarkable woman in any age, but as an acknowledged leading mathematician and astronomer at a time when the education of most women was extremely restricted, her achievement was extraordinary. Laplace famously told her that 'There have been only three wo[...]