The Collected Works of Mary Somerville

Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was a mathematician, she became a leading scientific author, celebrated for the clarity and focus of her writing.

Her books brought readers up-todate with the latest findings, in subjects ranging from astronomy and anthropology to microscopy and geology.

She introduced the English-speaking world to the technicalities of Pierre-Simon Laplace's celestial mechanics, wrote a survey of physical geography and revealed the common bonds between the sciences at a time when they were being carved up into distinct disciplines.

For contemporaries, the most remarkable fact about Somerville was that she was a woman.

Science was increasingly a masculine arena during the industrial era, and for a woman to master higher mathematics was especially unusual.

A pioneering advocate of women's education and political rights, Somerville maintained the modest demeanour expected of a genteel woman; but the scale of her ambition was signalled by her early entry into mathematical prize competitions and her studies of the action of sunlight.

The latter resulted in the first experimental paper by a woman ever published in the Royal Society of London's Philosophical Transactions.