Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell—then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum—wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word “scientist” to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point—“man of science”—clearly couldn’t apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect
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