Hypatia

Hypatia (AD 350–370, d. March 415)

was a Greek scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, who is considered the first notable woman mathematician; she also taught philosophy and astronomy. As a Neoplatonist philosopher, she belonged to the mathematic tradition of the Academy of Athens, as represented by Eudoxus of Cnidus; she was of the intellectual school of the 3rd century thinker Plotinus, which encouraged logic and mathematical study in place of empirical enquiry. Hypatia lived in Roman Egypt, and was assassinated by a Christian mob who accused her of causing religious turmoil. Kathleen Wilder proposes that the murder of Hypatia marked the end of Classical antiquity, while Maria Dzielska and Christian Wildberg note that Hellenistic philosophy continued to flourish in the 5th and 6th centuries, and perhaps until the age ofJustinian

ü Life

Hypatia

The mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria was the daughter of the mathematicianTheon Alexandricus (ca. 335–405), who educated her as was the norm for boys; he was the last librarian of the Library of Alexandria in the Museum of Alexandria. She was educated at Athens and in Italy; at about AD 400, she became headmistress of the Platonist school at Alexandria, where she imparted the knowledge of Plato and Aristotle, to any student; the pupils included pagans, Christians, and foreigners. The contemporary, 5th-century sources do not identify Hypatia of Alexandria as practicant of any religion, but, two hundred years later, the 7th-century Egyptian Coptic bishop John of Nikiû identified her as a Hellenistic pagan and that "she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles". Nonetheless, despite the historical record, the Christians later used Hypatia as symbolic of feminine Virtue. Moreover, the Byzantine Suda encyclopaedia reported that Hypatia was "the wife of Isidore the Philosopher" (Isidore of Alexandria), and that they (husband and wife) had agreed she would remain a virgin; and that she rejected a suitor with her menstrual rags, saying that they demonstrated "nothing beautiful" about carnal desire.

Hypatia corresponded with former pupil Synesius of Cyrene, who became bishop of Ptolemais in AD 410; and an author of the Christian Holy Trinity doctrine derived from the Platonic education he received from her. Together with the references by the pagan philosopher Damascius, these are the extant records left by Hypatia's pupils at the Platonist school of Alexandria. The contemporary Christian historiographer Socrates Scholasticus described her in Ecclesiastical History:

“	There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.	”

ü Death

Hypatia was believed to be the cause of strained relations between Orestes, the Imperial Roman Prefect, and the Patriarch Cyril, thus she attracted the hatred of the Christians of Alexandria, who wanted the politician and the priest to reconcile. One day, in March AD 415, during Lent, a Christian mob of Nitrian monks led by "Peter the Reader," waylaid Hypatia's chariot as she travelled home. The monks attacked Hypatia, then stripped her naked, to humiliate her, then dragged her through the streets to the recently Christianised Caesareum church, where they killed her. The reports suggest that the mob of Christian monks flayed her body with ostraca (pot shards), and then burned.