Mathematics
c. 355 to 415 CE, Alexandria, Roman Egypt
The mathematician who left no book of her own, yet kept Greek science alive - editing Ptolemy and Diophantus, teaching pagans and Christians alike, and dying a symbol of reason.
Start learning Hypatia →Who Hypatia really was - head of the Neoplatonist school of Alexandria, teacher of pagans and Christians alike - and why a mathematician who left no surviving writings could still be one of the great figures in the hist…
Hypatia’s hand in the greatest astronomical work of antiquity - Ptolemy’s Almagest and the Handy Tables - and what a ‘commentary’ or ‘critical edition’ truly meant: preserving, correc…
Hypatia’s commentary on the Arithmetica of Diophantus - what a ‘Diophantine problem’ is (whole-number and fractional solutions to equations), the first stirrings of symbolic algebra, and how the editio…
Mathematics made into metal and water - the astrolabe and the hydrometer - seen through the letters of Hypatia’s student Synesius, who asked her help in building them. Applied science in her circle, and the only c…
The honest history of 415 CE - the power struggle between the prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril, the Lenten mob, the killing recorded by Socrates Scholasticus - and then the fifteen centuries in which Hypatia became…
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