Tribute to Mary Somerville a Scottish scientist, writer, polymath. mathematician & astronomer

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Mary Somerville (née Fairfax, formerly Greig; 26 December 1780 – 29 November 1872) was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. 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".

Somerville College, a college of the University of Oxford, is named after her, reflecting the virtues of liberalism and academic success which the college wished to embody. She is featured on the front of the Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note launched in 2017, alongside a quotation from her work The Connection of the Physical Sciences.
In the year following Somerville's death, her autobiographical Personal Recollections was published, consisting of reminiscences written during her old age. Over 10,000 pieces are in the Somerville Collection of the Bodleian Library and Somerville College, Oxford. The collection includes papers relating to her writing and published work, and correspondence with family members, numerous scientists and writers, and other figures in public life. Also included is substantial correspondence with the Byron and Lovelace families.

Her shell collection was given to Somerville College, Oxford by her descendants.

Somerville Square in Burntisland is named after her family and marks the site of their home.


5771 Somerville (1987 ST1) is a main-belt asteroid discovered on 21 September 1987 by E. Bowell at Lowell Observatory Flagstaff, Arizona, and named after her. Somerville crater is a small lunar crater in the eastern part of the Moon. It lies to the east of the prominent crater Langrenus. It is one of a handful of lunar craters named after women.

In February 2016 she was shortlisted, along with Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and civil engineer Thomas Telford, in a public competition run by the Royal Bank of Scotland to decide whose face should appear on the bank's new £10 notes, to be issued in 2017. Later that month RBS announced that she had won the public vote, held on Facebook. The banknotes, bearing her image, were issued in the second half of 2017.

On 2 February 2020, Google celebrated her with a Google Doodle.