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Hypatia

I recently read the novel "Hypatia" by Charles Kingsley which is loosely based on the real person Hypatia and I became quite interested in finding out more about her and the time she lived in.

Hypatia was a mathematician, a philosopher and astronomer and a prominent thinker at the time. She was Greek and lived in Alexandria in the Eastern Roman Empire from ca. 350 - 370 AD until she was murdered in 415 AD. Hypatia was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria (ca.335 - ca. 405 AD (Anno Domini)) who probably also taught her. She herself then taught philosophy and astronomy to students coming from all over the Mediterranean and worked alongside her father all her life.

In her time astronomy was seen mainly as mathematical in nature and to my surprise there wasn't much of a difference made between mathematics, astrology and numerology. But she did some real astronomy in our sense of the word and knew for example how to (and did) construct astrolabes and hydrometers.

The night time at her time must have been impressive with thousands upon thousands of stars visible as no light pollution was disturbing their view.

She was among the leading mathematicians and astronomers in her time which was quite unusual for a woman. Her father Theon had corrected the mistakes in Euclid's Elements that had made it in by copying mistakes over 700 years and his edition was then for centuries the most widely known edition.

Hypatia wrote commentary on the book Arithmetica that had been written by Diophantus and had originally existed of 13 volumes. Unfortunately some volumes have been lost over the centuries but we know that it was a collection of 130 algebraic problems and their solutions. So Hypatia could solve algebraic equations. She also wrote a commentary about Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections which means that she also knew some geometry.

It is now mostly believed that she also edited the book Almagast by Ptolemy which covered the now shown as wrong geocentric model of the universe but also still valid concepts as the solar and lunar eclipses for example.

While editing the book she came up with an an improved method for the long division algorithms that are needed for astronomical computation.

While Hypatia lived in the Eastern Roman Empire she was Greek and spoke Greek like most intellectuals in Alexandria at the time. For her mathematics she therefore used Greek numerals (also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals). The Greeks used letters like the Romans but like the Arabic numerals only needed one symbol for each decimal place. Hypatia even knew already a kind of zero. In Roman literals the number zero is totally absent while today we know zero not just as "nothing" but also as a placeholder in positional numeric notation. In Hypatia's time the alphabetic Greek numerals were extended into a sexagesimal positioal numbering system which included a special symbol for zero but zero was only used alone and not combined with other digits.

In philosophy she held what we now call neoplatonist views and followed the teachings of Plotinus who said that the goal of philosophy was a "mystical union with the divine." For Plotinus there were 3 fundamental principals: "the One, the Intellect, and the Soul".

Towards the end of her life she advised Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria who was in a political fight with Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria which finally led to her being murdered by a mob of Christians monks led by a lector named Peter.

She was living in difficult (political) times and together with her father tried very hard to preserve the Greek mathematical and astronomical heritage.

Many sources are saying that the majority of the ancient Athenian population could read while then already during the Roman times when Hypatia lived the literacy rate was much lower in the general population even though children of affluent parents, especially boys usually learnt how to read and got some kind of an education. The Roman Empire was already in decline when Hypatia lived. Books definitively also were very expensive and so very few people actually owned books. The codex, the ancestor of the modern book however already existed at Hypatia's time. Before the codex texts were written on papyrus or parchment paper scrolls and rolled together which made them unconvenient for longer texts. The days of the library of Alexandria were already over and soon the dark ages in Europe followed. It's a pity that humans throughout history always go through centuries when ancient knowledge is forgotten and the thirst for knowledge has dried up.

Hypatia was a special woman. Educated and respected women like her were very rare but it seems that there were a few women who were educated and got recognition in the ancient world. She probably wasn't the first female mathematician though as there was Pandrosion before her who developed an approximate method for doubling the cube or more generally of calculating cube roots.

What I found also interesting was that so many people could actually read at the time. Maybe I missed it in school but I was always taught that in our time people are the most educated and now I learnt that this was wrong.

Hypatia's fate also tells us that human's quest for knowledge comes in waves. There are times when humans make great progress and scientific discoveries is in full bloom while those times are unfortunately always seem to be followed by times where everything is destroyed. It seems that we are unlucky enough to live in times that are falling into destruction. Let's hope that more knowledge can be saved this time.

references / further reading

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hypatia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/killing-hypatia
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/93055/how-ancient-greeks-did-math-letters-not-numbers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals
https://erenow.org/ancient/ancient-greece-and-rome-an-encyclopedia-for-students-4-volume-set/257.php
https://erickimphotography.com/blog/2023/12/13/how-did-the-ancient-romans-or-greeks-read-books/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex