Hypatia

Hypatia was the daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, with whom she worked, and became a celebrated teacher of mathematics, astronomy, and Platonist philosophy in that city. She is credited with editing or commenting on technical works — her father's edition of Euclid, the Arithmetic of Diophantus, the Conics of Apollonius, and astronomical tables — and is said to have helped design instruments such as the astrolabe with her students. Her public lectures drew hearers from across the Mediterranean.

Her philosophy belonged to the broad Neoplatonist tradition but was taught with a civic, public dignity rather than the ritual intensity of the contemporary Athenian school, and she seems to have moved easily among pagans and Christians alike. Her devoted pupil Synesius, who became a Christian bishop of Cyrene, left affectionate letters that are among the best evidence for her standing and character.

In 415, amid the bitter power struggles of Alexandria — between the prefect Orestes and the patriarch Cyril — Hypatia was seized by a mob and brutally killed. Her death came to symbolize the violent eclipse of the classical philosophical world, and across the centuries she has been remembered, and reinvented, as a martyr to reason, learning, and the life of the mind.

Her death made her a symbol, but her life made her a teacher. Daughter of Theon of Alexandria, the last attested scholar of the Museum, she edited and taught the hard mathematics of her age — Diophantus's Arithmetica, Apollonius's Conics, Ptolemy's tables — and led the Alexandrian school in the Plotinian manner, drawing pupils pagan and Christian alike. Synesius of Cyrene, later a bishop, wrote to her all his life as ‘mother, sister, teacher, benefactor.’

In March of 415 she was pulled from her carriage and murdered by a mob amid the feud between the prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril. Damascius, the last scholarch, set down the philosophers' verdict a century later, laying the guilt at Cyril's door — for the schools never forgot her. She wrote no system that survives; what survives is the figure of philosophy itself, teaching geometry in a dying world.