Hypatia

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Hypatia of Alexandria (born c.350–370, died 415) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and Neoplatonist philosopher, the most prominent thinker in the city in her generation and the head of its leading Platonist school. She is the earliest woman in the history of mathematics about whom anything substantial is known, and her death — torn apart by a Christian crowd in the streets of Alexandria — has made her a symbol attached to causes she never held.

What can be established about her work is real but spare. She was the daughter of the mathematician Theon, sometimes called the last known associate of the Alexandrian Museum, and she succeeded to and surpassed his teaching. The sources credit her with commentaries on the Arithmetic of Diophantus, on the Conics of Apollonius, and with work alongside her father on Ptolemy’s astronomical tables; none of her own writing survives intact. She taught philosophy publicly, lecturing on Plato and Aristotle to a circle of students drawn from across the eastern empire, some of whom rose to high office and kept up an admiring correspondence with her for the rest of their lives. The fullest near-contemporary witness is a set of letters from one such pupil, Synesius of Cyrene, who became a Christian bishop and still addressed her as his teacher.

Her Neoplatonism placed her in the tradition descending from Plotinus, in which all things proceed from a single transcendent source and the philosopher’s task is the soul’s ascent toward it. By her time that school had largely fused philosophy with religious practice; the degree to which Hypatia herself embraced its theurgic and devotional side, as against a more austere mathematical Platonism, is debated and cannot be settled from the surviving evidence.

The circumstances of her death are better attested than her thought. In 415 Alexandria was riven by a power struggle between the Roman prefect Orestes and the patriarch Cyril; Hypatia, a respected pagan close to Orestes, became a target of rumor that she was obstructing a reconciliation. A mob — described by the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, writing within a generation — seized her, dragged her into a church, and murdered her. Socrates, himself a Christian, records the act as a disgrace that brought reproach on the church of Alexandria.

Later ages remade her many times over: as a martyr to reason against fanaticism, as a feminist emblem, as a closing figure for classical antiquity. Each of these readings says as much about its own moment as about the woman, of whom the ancient record preserves a teacher of mathematics and Plato, and the manner of her killing.

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