72 A History ofMathematics
the imposition of European rule on Africa (Martin Bernal). Dzielska produces a convincing picture
of Hypatia as an influential teacher of mathematics, astronomy, and neoplatonic^9 philosophy to a
circle of initiates, both pagan and Christian.Around their teacher these students formed a community based on the Platonic system of thought and interpersonal
ties. They called the knowledge passed on to them by their ‘divine guide’ mysteries. They held it secret, refusing to share
it with people of lower social rank, whom they regarded as incapable of comprehending divine and cosmic matters
...Hypatia’s private classes and public lectures also included mathematics and astronomy, which primed the mind for
speculation on higher epistemological levels. (Dzielska 1995, p. 103)She shows Hypatia becoming involved in a power struggle between factions in Alexandria in the
years following 410 which led to a witch-hunt, and eventually to her death There was, indeed, a
careful line to be drawn in late Roman times between the praiseworthy pursuit of geometry (ars
geometriae) and the damnable art of astrology (confusingly,ars mathematica)—see Cuomo (2000,
p. 39); and Hypatia was probably not the only scholar to be caught on the wrong side of the line.
Dzielska further establishes, fairly convincingly, that her age at the time was about 60 (demolishing
the image of a beautiful maiden cut down in the bloom of youth), and points out that her death
was far from marking the end of learning in Alexandria, or the Greek world generally—or even of
paganism.
Pagan religiosity did not expire with Hypatia, and neither did mathematics and Greek philosophy. (Dzielska 1995,
p. 105)She also unearths a number of other references to women in the late Greek philosophical world,
which show Hypatia’s example to be not so unusual as had been thought.
This is helpful, but of course the historian of mathematics would like to have more, and here
as so often we enter the world of more or less ingenious conjecture. As Gibbon states, her father
was the mathematician Theon who has not been highly estimated in recent times (‘a competent
but unoriginal mathematician’, Calinger 1999, p. 219). However, like many others of the period
he studied and commented the difficult works of his predecessors, and edited the text of Euclid in a
version which was almost the only one to survive. The titles of several of Hypatia’s works—mainly
commentaries, for example, on Ptolemy and Diophantus, are known from later bibliography, and
Synesius, her student, was a philosopher not a mathematician; and by the time when Islamic
scholars recovered and translated Greek works, none of them bore her name. The scholar who
wishes to study her as a mathematician, supposing it possible, has to use a certain amount of
imaginative reconstruction. Nonetheless, in line with the revival of neglected women in antiquity,
she is given two pages in Calinger’s general history (1999), and that common and convenient
view which dismisses Theon’s works as pedestrian and second-rate attempts to pick out the more
interesting parts of them and ascribe them to Hypatia.^10
Following the initial stage of ‘recovery’, where the aim was to point out Hypatia’s status and
relative neglect as a mathematician, Dzielska’s work has been well received as perhaps marking
the start of a second period in the study of women mathematicians, still rather in its infancy:
an attempt to place them in a historical context, even when (as with Byzantine Alexandria) that- Neoplatonism was not simply a revival of Platonism, but had elements of mysticism; as such it played a semi-religious part in
the late Roman empire. - For these and similar arguments see Knorr (1989), who also suggests that, since Diophantus’sArithmeticaas it survives
contains comments, the edition itself in the form we have it may have been prepared by Hypatia. Doubts are expressed by
Cameron (1990).