Old Photograph High Street Jedburgh Scotland

Old photograph of cars, shops, buildings and people on the High Street in Jedburgh, Scottish Borders, Scotland. Mary Fairfax Somerville was born at the manse in Jedburgh on 26 December 1780. Her childhood home was at Burntisland, Fife. studied art with Alexander Nasmyth in Edinburgh, who taught her about perspective. Inspired, she managed to obtain a copy of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and began to teach herself from it. In 1804, she married her distant cousin, the Russian consul in London, England, Captain Samuel Greig, son of Admiral Samuel Greig. They had two children, one of whom, Woronzow Greig, would become a barrister and scientist. However, he died in 1807 and she returned home to Scotland. In 1812, she married another cousin, Dr William Somerville. She was passionate about astronomy and believed it to be the most extensive example of the connection of the physical sciences in that it combined the sciences of number and quantity, of rest and motion. Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, wrote in 1829 that Mary Somerville was " certainly the most extraordinary woman in Europe, a mathematician of the very first rank with all the gentleness of a woman. She was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. She was elected to honorary membership of the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève in 1834 and, in the same year, to the Royal Irish Academy. She was elected to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in 1857 and the Italian Geographical Society in 1870. In 1869 she was awarded the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, then also known as the Victoria Medal, and and was made a member of the American Philosophical Society. " She died in Naples on 29 November 1872, and was buried there in the English Cemetery.



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