Mary Somerville

Somerville's Mechanism of the Heavens (1831) set out the mathematics of Laplace's celestial mechanics in English. In 1832 George Peacock wrote that he and William Whewell had taken steps to bring it into the course of study at Cambridge. An 1832 Quarterly Review notice, attributed to John Herschel, called its preliminary dissertation the best condensed view of Newton's system yet published, while faulting a habitual looseness of wording.

On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834) grew out of that preliminary dissertation and surveyed astronomy, sound, optics, heat, electricity and magnetism as parts of one picture held together by mathematical analysis. A Quarterly Review notice attributed to Whewell discussed it in 1834, and she kept revising the book through later editions; the 1849 edition, for example, added the recent discovery of Neptune.

In February 1835 Somerville and Caroline Herschel were elected the first women honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. She went on to publish Physical Geography (1848) and Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869).

Somerville sent the manuscript of the Mechanism to Henry Brougham asking that it be thoroughly examined and criticised. John Herschel read it, and in a letter of February 1830 he told her that in her place he would give the opening exposition of principles at least double the space. She preserved his letters, which were printed in her posthumous Recollections (1873). For her next book, archival work by the historian Brigitte Stenhouse shows proof sheets going to Whewell and to J. D. Forbes before publication.

Sending drafts to expert readers before publishing them is one practice behind the profile's moderate collaboration score. These were reviews of her own work, not joint authorship. Collaboration

In March 1835 the historian Henry Hallam wrote to point out that the Connexion gave the ancient Egyptian civil year as 365 days 6 hours, when it had only 365 days. The 1835 second edition still carried the old figures, but the 1849 and 1858 editions use Hallam's 365-day year and 1,461-year cycle. In her memoir she records the error and her gratitude for the correction.

Taking a correction from outside her field into later editions offers one modest example of the belief updating this profile scores. The fix took more than one edition to appear. Belief Updating

In March 1827 Henry Brougham wrote to her husband asking whether she would write an account of Laplace's Mécanique céleste for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. In her own account, she agreed only if the work stayed secret and the manuscript would be burned if she failed. The book outgrew the Society's series and John Murray published it in 1831; it was her first book, and its reception at Cambridge and in the reviews established her as a scientific author.

Its preliminary dissertation, which drew together the consequences of gravitation from planetary orbits to tides, sits alongside the profile's score for systems abstraction. The Royal Astronomical Society's 1873 notice, critical of the book in other respects, praised that dissertation highly. Systems Thinking