Hypatia
360 – 415 · Egypt
Known for: Mathematician, astronomer and Neoplatonist philosopher of ancient Alexandria
“She presided over the mysteries of philosophy, and taught in the open air of Alexandria.”
Biography
Hypatia was born in Alexandria, then a city of the Roman province of Egypt, at some point between about 350 and 370. Her father was Theon of Alexandria, a mathematician who headed an exclusive and doctrinally conservative school and whose chief achievement was a corrected edition of Euclid's Elements, a version that displaced nearly all others for centuries. Nothing at all is known of her mother, who appears in no surviving source. Trained within her father's tradition, Hypatia became a Neoplatonist of the older Plotinian kind, setting aside the more overtly ritual teachings of Iamblichus that were favoured elsewhere in the city.
Alexandria was regarded in her lifetime as second only to Athens as a centre of philosophy, and Hypatia drew students from across the Mediterranean. She lectured on Plato and Aristotle, and according to the later philosopher Damascius she walked through the city in the tribon, the cloak of a philosopher, giving lectures in public. Her scholarly work included a commentary on the thirteen books of Diophantus's Arithmetica, parts of which may survive folded into the transmitted text, and a commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, now lost; many scholars believe she had a hand in the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest. She also built astrolabes and hydrometers, instruments long in use before her, and though she remained a pagan, every one of her known students was Christian, among them Synesius of Cyrene, later bishop of Ptolemais, whose seven surviving letters to her are the main record of her career.
Her standing brought her influence with the political elite. Late in life she advised Orestes, the Roman prefect, during his bitter feud with Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, and rumours circulated that she was obstructing any reconciliation. In March 415 she was seized and killed by a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter. The murder shocked the empire and made her a martyr for philosophy; in later centuries she was recast in turn as a model of virtue, an Enlightenment emblem, the heroine of Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel, and a figure of the women's movement. She remains the first woman mathematician whose life is reasonably well documented.