Mary Somerville

Mary Somerville ( ; , formerly Greig; 26 December 1780 – 29 November 1872) was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When John Stuart Mill organized a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he made sure that the first signature on the petition would be Somerville's.

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". One of the earliest uses of the word scientist was in a review by William Whewell of Somerville's second book ''On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences''. However, the word was not used to describe Somerville herself; she was known and celebrated as a mathematician or a philosopher.

Somerville College, a college of the University of Oxford, is named after her, reflecting the virtues of liberalism and academic success that the college wished to embody. She is featured on the front of the Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note launched in 2017 along with a quotation from her work ''On the Connection of the Physical Sciences''. Provided by Wikipedia