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Hypatia

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Hypatia led the Neoplatonist school in Alexandria, editing Diophantus's Arithmetica and Ptolemy's Almagest and teaching astronomy and mathematics to students who went on to prominent careers across the Roman world. In March 415 she was murdered by a Christian mob during a period of political conflict between the Roman prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril. No text written in her own hand survives; what is known of her work comes through her students' writings and later commentary.

Facts
Disputed
Birth Year
370 1
Sourced to the subject's own accountHistorians disagree on her birth year by two decades. One camp, following Richard Hoche's nineteenth century reasoning from the timing of her scholarly output, places her birth around 370 CE, the year recorded here. A second camp argues for a birth around 350 CE, reasoning from ancient descriptions of her as an elderly woman at her death in 415. No contemporary record states her age directly, so the disagreement cannot be settled from the surviving sources.
Death YearSourced to the subject's own account
415 1
FieldSourced to the subject's own account
Mathematics and astronomy 1
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1. Hypatia (Wikipedia)
WikipediaLead section
Quote, Lead section
Hypatia (born c. 350–370 – March 415 AD) was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, at that time in the province of Egypt and a major city of the Roman Empire.
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