Hypatia (born c. 355ce—died March 415, Alexandria) was amathematician,astronomer, andphilosopher who lived in a very turbulent era inAlexandria’s history. She is the earliest female mathematician of whose life and work reasonably detailed knowledge exists.

Hypatia was the daughter ofTheon of Alexandria, himself a mathematician and astronomer and the lastattested member of theAlexandrian Museum (seeResearcher’s Note: Hypatia’s birth date). Theon is best remembered for the part he played in the preservation ofEuclid’sElements, but he also wrote extensively, commenting onPtolemy’sAlmagest andHandy Tables. Hypatia continued his program, which was essentially a determined effort to preserve the Greek mathematical and astronomical heritage in extremely difficult times. She is credited with commentaries onApollonius of Perga’sConics (geometry) andDiophantus of Alexandria’sArithmetic (number theory), as well as an astronomical table (possibly a revised version of Book III of her father’s commentary on theAlmagest). These works, the only ones she is listed as having written, have been lost, although there have been attempts to reconstruct aspects of them. In producing her commentaries on Apollonius and Diophantus, she was pushing the program initiated by her father into more recent and more difficult areas.

She was, in her time, the world’s leading mathematician and astronomer, the only woman for whom such claim can be made. She was also a popular teacher and lecturer on philosophical topics of a less-specialist nature, attracting many loyal students and large audiences. Herphilosophy wasNeoplatonist and was thus seen as “pagan” at a time of bitter religious conflict between Christians (both orthodox and “heretical”), Jews, and pagans. HerNeoplatonism was concerned with the approach to the One, an underlying reality partially accessible via the human power of abstraction from thePlatonic forms, themselves abstractions from the world of everyday reality. Her philosophy also led her to embrace a life of dedicated virginity.

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An earlymanifestation of the religious divide of the time was the razing of theSerapeum, the temple of the Greco-Egyptian godSerapis, byTheophilus, Alexandria’s bishop until his death in 412ce. This event was perhaps the final end of the greatLibrary of Alexandria, since the Serapeum may have contained some of the Library’s books. Theophilus, however, was friendly with Synesius, anardent admirer and pupil of Hypatia, so she was not herself affected by this development but was permitted to pursue herintellectual endeavours unimpeded. With the deaths of Synesius and Theophilus and the accession ofCyril to the bishopric of Alexandria, however, this climate of tolerance lapsed, and shortly afterward Hypatia became the victim of a particularly brutalmurder at the hands of a gang of Christianzealots. It remains a matter of vigorous debate how much the guilt of this atrocity is Cyril’s, but the affair made Hypatia a powerfulfeminist symbol and a figure of affirmation for intellectual endeavour in the face of ignorantprejudice. Her intellectual accomplishments alone were quite sufficient to merit the preservation and respect of her name, but, sadly, the manner of her death added to it an even greater emphasis.