"Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780-1872), a remarkable figure in Victorian science, was more productive as the wife of Dr. Somerville than as young Mary Fairfax or as Mrs. Samuel Grieg. As Mary Fairfax, a young upper-class Scotswoman and daughter of a vice-admiral, she had encountered opposition to her studying mathematics. Later on, as Mrs. Grieg, the wife of an unsympathetic Russian naval captain, she met less resistance but gained no support. As Mrs. William Somerville, however, the wife of a medical doctor and cousin (she had been widowed three years after marrying Grieg), she moved into the intellectual sphere, becoming a grand dame of science. Her translation of LaPlace's Celestial Mechanics (1831), the great success of On the Connection of the Physical Sciences (1834), which she wrote under her own name, and her precedent-setting election (with Caroline Herschel) to the Royal Astronomical Society were just a few of the reasons why the Morning Post referred to her when she died as the queen of nineteenth-century science. She knew all the leading scientists of the day and kept up with events on the Continent. "The latest experiments and speculations in every part of Europe are referred to," wrote William Whewell admiringly in his review of On the Connection of the Physical Sciences... Mrs. Somerville's expertise and reputation were such that Sophia (Mrs. [Augustus] De Morgan by 1837) suggests in her memoirs, Threescore Years and Ten, that Mrs. Somerville was a kind of touchstone for mathematically gifted women."

Baum, p. 31-32
Submitted by Linda Talisman