As a female mathematician in Regency Britain, Mary Somerville (1780-1872) relied on informal, social networks in order to access mathematical ideas and communities. Her extensive papers and correspondence demonstrate that, although this reliance was more prominent for Somerville owing to her gender, in fact such networks within and across households were a non-trivial part of the organisation of science and mathematics at the time. This talk will delineate and explore the role of the household, and the mathematics which took place within it, and work to deconstruct the dominance of “gentlemen of science” in the Regency period.
