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In Human Intelligence, novelist and writer Naomi Alderman looks at some of the most brilliant minds in human history.

One of the teachers profiled is Mary Somerville, a brilliant polymath who found time to correct the work of Isaac Newton while looking after her infant children.

Mary Somerville’s writings, across a range of disciplines – maths, astronomy, botany, geography – became essential reading for those learning science, and helped to define what a scientist was in the early 19th century.

Here are eight things we learned about her:

Mary wasn’t poor but her start in life did not exactly fast-track her to success. Born in Jedburgh, Scotland in 1780, Mary didn’t go to school until the age of ten and, once there, wasn’t taught any algebra or higher maths, nor was she encouraged to pursue science in any way.

Ada Lovelace, who was taught by Mary Somerville

However, Mary’s curiosity in maths was piqued when she saw an algebra puzzle in a friend’s fashion magazine. She begged her brother’s tutor to buy her Euclid’s Elements of Geometry and a book about algebra used in schools. Her parents disapproved of her studies so much that they took away the candles that Mary had used to read the books. Determined not to be discouraged, Mary memorised the texts and would go over them in her head as she lay in the dark.

Her first husband didn't encourage her either

Scientific knowledge exploded in the early 19th century, but Mary's efforts to educate herself about maths and the sciences were not only shunned by her parents but Mary’s first husband, Lieutenant Samuel Greig, whom she married in 1804. “He was even more against women's education,” says Naomi, and he had, in Somerville's words, “a very low opinion of the capacity of my sex and took no interest in science or literature.”

Her parental duties didn’t stop her learning

Mary had two children with Samuel Greig, who died just three years into their marriage. She would then have another four with her cousin Dr William Somerville, whom she married in 1812. He was very encouraging of Mary’s status as a polymath and, by that time, she had published numerous papers and best-selling books on maths and science; she was a tutor to the young Ada Lovelace, who is often called the first computer programmer.

William Somerville also helped his wife by borrowing books for her from the then men-only scientific fellowship, the Royal Society. Otherwise, Mary was very much a social networker, corresponding with leaders in their field and also through social visits, including dinner parties held by “grand amateurs” – wealthy men who had enough money to have their own telescopes in their back gardens.

She wrote the "everything book" on science, for everyone to learn from

Her voracious appetite for knowledge and exhaustive networking put Mary in a pivotal position to collate and analyse all kinds of scientific discoveries. The Connection of the Physical Sciences was, says Naomi, “the kind of work done today by thousands of scientific journal editors, academic departments and professors. Sifting and understanding the research that's happening. Making connections.”

Dr Brigitte Stenhouse, Lecturer in the History of Mathematics at The Open University, adds that the book brought “cutting edge ideas to the reading public”. Mary was “a direct conduit” between them and the scientists, a word that was first used in a review of the book itself. “She also aimed these books not just towards men, but also towards women,” says Dr Stenhouse, “so she really saw her work as providing access to scientific knowledge to people who might not otherwise have that.”

She helped discover Neptune

One example of the knock-on effect of Mary’s work in The Connection of the Physical Science was Mary’s discussion, in the 1836 edition, of the difficulty in calculating the position of Uranus. Mary wrote that, mathematically-speaking, this meant there could be an undiscovered planet affecting its orbit. “Bringing that information together ultimately inspired the work that led to the discovery of the planet Neptune,” says Naomi.

Mary and her husband William shared an interest in mineralogy and, on one of their numerous trips to Italy, they climbed Mount Vesuvius, near Naples, just days after an eruption. She wrote: “It was still smoking very much. However, we ascended it and walked around the crater, running and holding a handkerchief to our nose as we passed through the smoke. The lava was hard enough to bear, but there were numerous fumaroles or red-hot chasms in it which we could look into.”

She didn’t let age stop her

Mary’s intellectual ability did not dim with old age. In her late nineties, she started to study complex four-dimensional numbers called quaternions, a branch of mathematics that has remained niche save for its use in some video game software. While Mary admitted that her memory for “ordinary events and especially names” was fading, she wrote: “I'm still able to read books on the high algebra for four or five hours in the morning and even to solve the problems. Sometimes I find them difficult, but my old obstinacy remains. For if I do not succeed today, I attack them again on the morrow.”

Listen to Teachers: Mary Somerville here