This is so late, please can we pretend I’m in Seattle this week (I'm not)

I hope you enjoyed A Room Of One’s Own last week. This week I have another out of copyright treat for you, in the form of the autobiography of Mary Somerville. As well as being a 19^th century woman mathematician who has an Oxford college named after her, she is also from the town right next to my home town! I did not know this until I went to a café there over the Christmas break, the display of which really played down her attitude to the town:

The manners and customs of the people who inhabited this pretty spot at that time were exceedingly primitive.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/27747/pg27747.txt

Anyway, Somerville was also more or less self taught, which I always enjoy reading about, and did maths problems for fun until the day she died:

Although deaf and frail in her later years, she retained her mental faculties and even continued to, in her words, "read books on the higher algebra for four or five hours in the morning, and even to solve problems" until her peaceful death at the age of ninety two

https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/somer.htm

Speaking of copyright! This is sort of work related, but I really enjoyed this story of “Happy Birthday” and the woman who made it free to sing on television (if that is what you are into)

While doing research and discovery for the lawsuit, documentarian Jennifer Nelson’s lawyers managed to uncover a children’s song book published in 1922 that contained “Happy Birthday” with no copyright notice on it at all — which meant that the song, previously published without copyright protection, has never been protected as Warner/Chappell claimed.

http://the-toast.net/2016/03/17/happy-birthday-music-copyright/

Alex.