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STEM Heroines: Math role models for girls

Here's our list of female mathematicians through history who broke down barriers in their own lives to learn and live as experts in their field.  

9. Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780 – 1872)

Erik Hill/Anchorage Daily News/AP
Etienne Soboleff of Juneau-Douglas High School wraps up a 30-minute science test at the GCI Alaska Academic Decathlon held at the Hilton Anchorage Hotel in downtown Anchorage. Alaska, on Thursday, Feb. 20.

  • By Staff Correspondent

This Scottish mathematician was known as the "Queen of Nineteenth Century Science." She not only produced her own writings on theoretical and mathematical science, but also produced a geography textbook late in her career that was used in schools and universities for five decades after its publication.

In 1804, she married Capt. Samuel Greig, who opposed Ms. Somerville studying mathematics and science. After his death in 1807, she returned to Scotland and began to study astronomy and became a student of Isaac Newton’s Principia, the premier work on mathematics published in 1687. In 1812, she was married again, to William Somerville, a surgeon in the British Navy who supported her research.

Among other accolades, she was recognized as the first woman to have a paper read by the Royal Society – one of the world’s premier science organizations – when in 1825 she presented her findings on magnetism in a paper titled “The Magnetic Properties of Violet Rays of the Solar System.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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