Hypatia

Hypatia (born in Alexandria, probably around 370, though sources give dates between 350 and 370) was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician who taught in Alexandria during late antiquity. She is the first woman mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded, and her importance lies both in her teaching and in the place she held in a city where classical thought coexisted with a rapidly growing Christianity.

She was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, a mathematician and astronomer who led a conservative school. Nothing reliable is known about her mother. Theon trained her in mathematics and astronomy, and also in physical exercise, including rowing and horsemanship, as well as in rhetoric, a skill highly valued in the Roman world. Hypatia turned away from the more ritualistic line of Iamblichus and followed the original Neoplatonism of Plotinus. She lectured on Plato and Aristotle, and according to Damascius she walked through the city wearing the tribon, the cloak associated with philosophers, giving impromptu talks. There is no firm evidence that she travelled to Athens or Rome, and some scholars think she never left Alexandria.

Little of her written work survives with certainty. She is credited with commentaries on Diophantus's Arithmetica and on Apollonius of Perga's work on conic sections, and perhaps with an edition of Ptolemy's Almagest. She is also associated with the construction of astrolabes and hydrometers, although these instruments were already in use before her time. Most of what we know about her comes from the letters of Synesius of Cyrene, one of her Christian students, who later became bishop of Ptolemais and wrote of her with deep admiration. Her school brought together Christians and pagans from the elite, and the tolerance of the authorities allowed her to teach without interference.

In her last years she held considerable influence in Alexandria's political circles and was close to the prefect Orestes. After the death of bishop Theophilus in 412, a dispute over the succession broke out between Cyril and his rival Timothy, and Hypatia came to be associated with the prefect, who was at odds with Cyril. In March 415 she was seized and killed by a crowd of Christians, reportedly led by a lector named Peter. Whether Cyril was involved remains debated. Socrates of Constantinople, the historian closest to these events, says her death brought great disgrace upon the church of Alexandria, but does not directly blame the patriarch.

Her figure was turned into a symbol. The Enlightenment presented her as a martyr of science against religious fanaticism, and nineteenth-century writers, including Charles Kingsley, romanticised her. In the twentieth century she was claimed as a precursor of feminism. Historians now qualify these readings: her killing was an exceptional episode, the Neoplatonic school of Alexandria continued after her death, and linking her murder to the destruction of the Library is anachronistic, since the library no longer existed in her lifetime.