TODAY, 8 March, is International Women鈥檚 Day. It would be too easy to use this occasion to complain about the scarcely changing number of women scientists who make it to the top (only 3.7 per cent of Britain鈥檚 prestigious Royal Society fellows are female, while in the US women with doctorates are still only half as likely as men to become full university professors).
Instead let鈥檚 turn to a tale of a wonderful role model for women. It鈥檚 also a tale that has an all-too-familiar cautionary ending for outspoken women aiming at the top. The tale is of Hypatia, history鈥檚 best-known female mathematician, inventor and philosopher. She was born around AD 370 in the Greek city of Alexandria, and by AD 400 she had risen to become the head of the neo-Platonist school in Alexandria.
According to commentators of the day, Hypatia was individualist, charismatic and even beautiful as she strode around Alexandria in the tatty doak beloved of academics. 鈥淩eserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all,鈥� was one of her sayings.
Advertisement
Her mathematical works created a stir, especially in algebra, where she completely revised Diophantus鈥檚 famous Arithmetica and added commentary, explanation and new examples.
So where can we find Hypatia鈥檚 book? Unfortunately, it was destroyed long since and we know of it only through a 10th-century encyclopedia.
What about her inventions? According to the letters of Synesius, one of her pupils, she invented a graduated brass hydrometer for measuring the specific gravity of liquids, a plane astrolabe to measure the position of the stars, planets and the Sun, and various methods of distillation.
What fuelled her astonishing creativity? Hypatia was fortunate to receive a wonderful education. Her father, Theon, was a mathematician, philosopher and librarian 鈥� and dreamed of bringing up 鈥渢he perfect human being鈥�. Unlike other women of her day, Hypatia grew up with considerable intellectual freedom, and Theon made sure she got the best education on offer in Alexandria, Athens and Italy.
Her start in life was wonderful but her ending was tragic. To be an outspoken, rationalist woman in early 5th-century Alexandria was to court disaster. Extreme Christian fundamentalists were intent on assaulting older pagan rationalism. Legend has it that one dark night, on the way home from the Alexandrian Museum, she was dragged off and hacked to death, and her remains burnt.
Her attackers? They were said to be a group of monks who followed Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria. Cyril had come to power only after a riot, and he seems to have lived his life among riots 鈥� some of them caused by his draconian policies such as expelling all Jews from Alexandria. Cyril was later canonised by the Roman Catholic church.
But the real hero of this tale is, of course, Hypatia.
