About:

Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was an eminent Scottish scientist of the 19th century. She made important contributions in mathematics and astronomy, such as her paper 'On the magnetizing power of the more refrangible solar rays' in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1826. She was one of the first two women to be elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835 (the other was Caroline Herschel). Her outstanding science was inextricable from her powers of exposition as might be seen in her beautiful book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), a best-seller that went through many editions and is often regarded as the first 'popular science' book. Remarkably, the third edition of the book (1836) and subsequent ones contained a discussion, based on tables of observation, about the possibility of an unknown planet perturbing Uranus. This led to the subsequent precise prediction of the position of Neptune by John Couch Adams in 1845.

This lecture series for the general public on high-level topics at the interface of mathematics and other domains of inquiry commemorated the work and life of Mary Somerville. 

Timings for the evening:

18:00-18:15 Introduction by Minhyong Kim

18:15-19:00 Lecture by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

19:00-19:15 Discussion and Q&A.

About the talk:

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) is often regarded as the first great American scientist and was certainly one of the most influential scientists of the 19th century. Together with James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, he put the study of physical chemistry and statistical mechanics on a firm foundational footing. What they constructed was a mathematically rigorous theory of matter describing how atoms come together to form the large objects of sensory experience, foreseeing thereby the quantum revolution of the 20th century. Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was an American writer and political activist, whose multi-genre prose projects and powerful poetry addressed feminism, social justice, and the modern American experience. A representative example is her 1938 long poem, The Book of the Dead, documenting in verse form the circumstances and consequences of an industrial disaster, 'The Hawk's Nest Incident' in West Virginia. She believed passionately in an integrated view of human knowledge and the social experience, and that both poetry and science are essential to the healthy functioning of a democracy.  
 
Remarkably, the first biography of Gibbs was written by Rukeyser in 1942, even though she had no formal training in science. This talk investigated the motivation and historical context of this vast and difficult work, whose reading elucidates the intricate interaction between the various modes of interrogating the deep structure of the world around us.

About the speaker:

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (she/her) (Bristol) with the assistance of Minhyong Kim (he/him) (ICMS)

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century (Cornell UP, 2022). She recovered and edited Rukeyser's lost Spanish Civil War novel, Savage Coast (Feminist Press, 2013) and co-edited the volume The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell UP, 2023). She is writing the first biography of Rukeyser for Bloomsbury and is a 2022-23 NEH Public Scholars Fellow. She is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Women's Writing at the University of Bristol (UK).

Minhyong Kim is the Director of the ICMS. He researches arithmetic geometry, topology, and mathematical physics. He has written eight books on mathematics for the general public, a number of which have been bestsellers in South Korea.