The Death of Hypatia
#Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 370-c. 415)
Hypatia of #Alexandria was #martyred by being torn to shreds by a #ChristianMob, partly because she did not adhere to strict #Christian principles. She considered herself a neo-#Platonist, a pagan, and a follower of #Pythagorean ideas. Interestingly, Hypatia is the first #woman #mathematician in the history of humanity of whom we have reasonably secure and detailed knowledge. Although we know little about her physical appearance, the Greek scholar Damascius (c. 462-c. 538) wrote that Hypatia was physically attractive and determinedly celibate. When asked why she was obsessed with #mathematics and would not marry, she replied that she was wedded to the truth.
Hypatia's works include commentaries on Diophantus's Arithmetica. In one of her #mathematical problems for her students, she asked them for the integer solution of the pair
of simultaneous #equations: x - y = a and x2 - y- = (x - y) + b, where a and b are known.
Can you find any integer values for x, y, a, and b that make both of these formulas true?
The #FuckingChristians were her strongest philosophical rivals, and they officially discouraged her #Platonic assertions about the nature of God and the afterlife. On a warm March day in AD 414, a crowd of Christian #zealots seized her, stripped her, and proceeded to scrape her flesh from her bones using sharp shells. Next, they cut up her body and burned the pieces.
Like some victims of #religiousT
errorism today, she may have been seized merely because she was a famous person on the other side of the religious divide. It was not until after the Renaissance that another woman, Maria #Agnesi, made her name as a famous mathematician.
Hypatia's death triggered the departure of many scholars from Alexandria and, in many ways, marked the end of centuries of Greek progress in mathematics. During the European Dark Ages, Arabs and Hindus were the ones to play the leading roles in fostering the progress of mathematics.
SEE ALSO #Pythagoras Founds Mathematical Brotherhood (c. 530 BC), Diophantus's Arithmetica (250), Agnesi's Instituzioni Analitiche (1748), and The Doctorate of Kovalevskaya (1874).
In 1885, British painter Charles William Mitchell depicted Hypatia moments before her death at the hands of a Christian mob that stripped her and slaughtered her in a church. According to some reports, she was flayed with sharp objects and then burned alive.
from The Math Book (Pickover, 2009)
