Hypatia of Alexandria

Hypatia was born in Alexandria, in Roman Egypt, between about 350 and 370 — the ancient sources leave the year in honest dispute — the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, whose edition of Euclid's Elements carried that book to nearly every reader for fifteen centuries after. He trained her in mathematics and astronomy, and she surpassed the training.

By about the year 400 she led her own Neoplatonist school in Alexandria, teaching philosophy and the exact sciences to students pagan and Christian alike, who came to her from across the Mediterranean. The most devoted of them, Synesius of Cyrene, later a bishop, left the letters by which we still hear her praised. She wrote commentaries on Diophantus' Arithmetica and Apollonius' Conics, prepared the Astronomical Canon, and her father's own title on the third book of the Almagest credits the revision to his daughter's hand. Her students learned from her how to build the instruments of the science — the astrolabe, the water-weighing hydrometer — crafts she taught, not inventions she claimed.

When the city's power split between the prefect Orestes, who sought her counsel, and the patriarch Cyril, her influence was blamed for the standoff. In the Lent of 415 a Christian mob — often identified with the parabalani — led by a lector named Peter dragged her to the Caesareum church, killed her with shards, and burned her body. A year later the empire answered by reining in the parabalani by law; what the city had lost, no law could restore.

She stands as the earliest woman of mathematics whose life and work the record preserves whole — teacher of bishops, keeper of the exact sciences, murdered where politics and learning crossed. Honored be Hypatia of Alexandria, who taught the heavens in a city that killed her for it.