The History of Mathematics: A Brief Course

3. MODERN EUROPEAN WOMEN 85

the curvature of surfaces (another interest of Gauss, but also connected with elas-

ticity through a principle Sophie Germain had derived from Euler's work) from the

time she was stricken with breast cancer in 1829 until her death in 1831.

3.2. Nineteenth-century British women. In Britain, as on the Continent, the

admission of women to universities began at a very slow pace in the late nine-

teenth century. Before that time women had to have some means of support for

private study or otherwise blaze their own trails through the wilderness. As on the

Continent, the earliest women were not specialists in mathematics but had general

philosophical interests.

Mary Somerville. The work of Mary Somerville, coming about 75 years later than

that of the Marquise du Chatelet, bears many resemblances to the latter, being

largely expository and philosophical in nature. Mary Somerville was born in Jed-

burgh, Scotland, on December 26, 1780, to the family of William George Fairfax,

a naval officer. Like Sophie Germain, she received no encouragement toward a

scientific education. Indeed, although her mother taught her to read, she had to

learn to write all by herself. Education was reserved for her brothers, although she

did spend one year, which she hated, in a boarding school for girls. Like Sophie

Germain, she decided to educate herself. With the encouragement of an uncle,

she began learning Latin, so that alongside the education given to most girls in

her day—piano, painting, needlework—she was undertaking technical subjects. A

chance remark of her painting tutor, overheard by Mary, to the effect that Euclid

was both the secret of perspective in art and the foundation of many other sciences,

led her to study geometry with her younger brother's tutor. A brief first marriage,

to a naval officer who had no appreciation of her ability or her desire to learn, led to

the birth of two sons. When her husband died after only three years, she returned

to Scotland with her sons, where she found a circle of sympathetic friends, including

the geometer John Playfair (1748-1819), editor of a famous edition of Euclid and

the man who formulated the now-common version of Euclid's fifth postulate, which

is known as Playfair's Axiom. For one solution to a mathematical problem set in a

popular journal, she received a silver medal in 1811 (which, it will be remembered,

was the year in which Sophie Germain unsuccessfully sought a prize from the Paris

Academy for work on a much more substantial problem).

The following year she married William Somerville, an inspector of hospitals.

William proved to be much more supportive than her first husband, and together

they studied geology. When he was appointed as inspector to the Army Medical

Board in 1816 and elected to the Royal Society, they moved to London, where they

made the acquaintance of the leading scientists of the day. In an 1826 treatise

on electromagnetism by Harvard professor John Farrar (1779-1853), used widely

throughout American universities in the 1830s, Mary Somerville is mentioned as

having performed a vanguard experiment in electromagnetic theory. In Italy it had

been discovered that when a beam of violet light was used to stroke a metal needle

repeatedly in the same direction for a long time, the needle became magnetized.

At the time physicists speculated that this effect might be due to the particular

properties of sunlight in Italy. By verifying that the same effect could be obtained in

Edinburgh, Mary Somerville showed that the explanation had to be in the physics

of violet light itself. Her paper on this subject was reported in a paper bearing the

title "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum," published