There was no word for what this woman did. So Britain had to make one. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧 Mary Somerville's whole schooling was 1 year, at a girls' boarding school in Musselburgh. She left it feeling, in her own words, like a wild animal escaped out of a cage. After that she taught herself, from the family shelves, by candles they tried to take away. The spark was a puzzle on the back page of a friend's fashion magazine, numbers mixed in with letters. Nobody she asked could explain it. It was algebra, and she wanted more. Custom stopped a woman buying such books, so her brother's tutor bought her Euclid. She worked through it alone, line by line. By 1811 she had taught herself enough to win a silver medal for mathematics. Then she took on Laplace's Mecanique Celeste, the mathematics of the heavens, in French. Asked to translate it for British readers she did far more. She rebuilt the mathematics inside it, and in 1831 The Mechanism of the Heavens went to print. Cambridge set it in front of its own students. 📜 In 1834 she joined the sciences together. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, light, tides and magnetism, in one book anyone could read. It sold and sold. And it broke open the English language. The Cambridge professor William Whewell sat down to review it, and no single word covered what she did. Man of science would not do. One had been floated, half in jest, at a science meeting the year before. His review of her book put it into print for the first time. 🔥 Scientist. The first person the word ever described in print was a Scotswoman with 1 year of school. A year on, she and Caroline Herschel became the Royal Astronomical Society's first women Honorary Members. 🏛️ Her pages on the wobble in Uranus's orbit helped point John Couch Adams at the hunt that found Neptune in 1846. She mentored a young Ada Lovelace and introduced her to Charles Babbage. In 1866 John Stuart Mill put her name first on his petition to Parliament for women's votes. Oxford named a college for her. And since 2017 her face has sat on the Royal Bank of Scotland's £10 note, printed beside a line from the book that needed a new word. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1 year of school. A puzzle in a magazine. And a word the whole world uses. Her word is still in your mouth. Stand a little taller when you say it. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you with them. 👉 proudofus.co.uk/support 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧