Meet Mary Somerville: The Brilliant Woman for Whom the Word "Scientist" Was Coined – The Marginalian
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Meet Mary Somerville: The Brilliant Woman for Whom the Word "Scientist" Was Coined
By Maria Popova
UPDATE: Somerville’s remarkable story, along with a fuller context of how the word "scientist" was coined, occupies a portion of Figuring.
The history of science is strewn with remarkable women who overcame a crushing dearth of opportunity and towering gender bias to contribute to the corpus of human knowledge in ways that have transformed our understanding of reality, the universe, and our place in it. In history’s hindsight, their legacy lives between the heartening and the heartbreaking — both a testament to their extraordinary genius and an elegy for the tragedy of denying basic human rights to entire populations. Among the most blazing examples are pioneering physicist Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission but was denied the Nobel Prize for the discovery, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars and was similarly excluded from the Nobel for her own discovery, and astronomer Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter and is still bereft of a Nobel as she approaches her ninth decade....