Today, we meet the great communicator of
19th-century English mathematics. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
The great Scottish authority
on math and science, Mary Somerville, died in 1872.
She was then 92 and writing a book on quaternions
-- the 19th-century form of vector analysis. She
was also reviewing a book on finite difference
This powerhouse of British intellectual life was
raised in a small town on the Firth of Forth.
Without a school to go to, she ran wild -- chasing
seabirds, gazing at stars. Her education was
catch-as-catch-can. Then she found out about
algebra and geometry. That was like a match in a
tinder box, and her parents were horrified. A
passion for mathematics could drive a teenage girl
Her self-education began in earnest when she was 27
-- after her first husband died and left her some
money to live on. Six years later, she wrote a
prize-winning paper on diophantine algebra. She
also married an English surgeon who held no stock
in 19th-century attitudes toward women.
By the time Mary Somerville reached her late
forties, the French had come to the end of a
brilliant period of mathematical work. The British
were far behind. In 1827, the Society for the
Diffusion of Knowledge asked her to write an
interpretation of Laplace's work on celestial
mechanics. The book, Mechanisms of the
Heavens, established her as a great
interpreter of 19th-century analysis. She wrote
four such treatises, and they helped reshape
English mathematics and science. She was 89 when
she finished the last one. By then England was the
world's scientific leader. By then the name
Somerville graced a College at Oxford, an Arctic
Island, and several society medals.
She was the red thread through the fabric of
England's rise to power. Her understanding seemed
to be limitless, and she corresponded with every
great French and English mathematician of the age.
For example, she was a close friend of Charles
Babbage, who invented the first computer.
During the 1830s, Lord Byron's daughter Ada
learned mathematics by the simple expedient of
pestering all the great minds of the day. Mary
Somerville tutored her for a while -- then Babbage
took her on as a pupil.
Mary Somerville also lived at the eye of the storm
that 19th-century science created by challenging
biblical literalism. It's a testament to her
authority that she was denounced in York Cathedral.
Yet she expressed a strong religious conviction
when she wrote,
Nothing has [so persuaded me] of the unity of the
Deity as these purely mental conceptions of
[mathematics], which have been by slow degrees
vouchsafed to man [and] which must have existed in
that sublimely omniscient Mind from eternity.
Of course those were also the words of someone who
deeply loved the mental flights that she made for
almost a century.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Osin, L.M., Women in Mathematics.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974, pp. 95-116.
Stein. D., Ada. Cambridge, MA, MIT
For another take on Somerville's biograp;hy, see Episode 1934.
Additional material on Somerville is to be found in Episode 828.
Mary Fairfax Somerville (from the frontispiece of
Somerville's On Molecular and Microscopic
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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