Mary Fairfax Somerville

Other names: 
Her maiden name was Fairfax.
Dates: 
26 Dec 1780- 29 Nov 1872

Mary Fairfax was born in Jedburgh in 1780 and grew up in Fife.

In 1804 she married her distant cousin, Captain Samuel Greig, and moved to London. They had two children. She was widowed in 1807 and returned to Scotland, where she studied mathematics.

In 1812 she remarried. Her second husband Dr William Somerville admired and encouraged her academic work.

Mary Somerville published her first paper, "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum", in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1826.

In 1834 she was elected to honorary membership of the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève and to the Royal Irish Academy. She was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835 and the American Geographical and Statistical Society in 1857. In 1869 she was awarded the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

When John Stuart Mill organised a massive petition to parliament to give women the right to vote, Mary Somerville was the first signatory.

She died in Naples, aged 91, ans is buried there.

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