Hypatia, the earliest known woman mathematician, wrote commentaries on several classic works of mathematics. The daughter of a mathematician, she was trained in mathematics and philosophy and became head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophical doctrines dating back to Plato's Academy. Hypatia was a respected teacher and influential citizen of Alexandria, greatly admired for her knowledge as well as for her decorum and dignity. Although Hypatia's original work has not survived, she is known from the letters of her student Synesius of Cyrene. She is also mentioned in the fifth-century Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus, and in the tenth-century Lexicon of Suda (or Suidas). Information about Hypatia is fragmentary and oblique, fact and fiction have mingled, and her life has become the stuff of legend, inconsistencies, and conflicting opinions.

Hypatia was born in Alexandria, Egypt; the year is generally thought to be 370, although some...