Hypatia Essay

Hypatia was born in Alexandria, Egypt at the fourth century around 350 – 370 AD. Her father was Theon of Alexandria, a great philosopher and mathematician. He was the last attested member of the Alexandrian museum. Hypatia was raised by her father in an educated environment in an era that was not usual for women to learn and be educated. She was an intellectual teacher, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and inventor Although Hypatia’s works did not stay preserved until now, we know a handful of her works by citations and quotations in other’s works. Hypatia worked with her father on Euclid’s Elements. She edited her father’s works on Euclid’s Elements. Hypatia wrote as well a commentary on "The Conics of Apollonius", which included Ptolemy's numerous observations of the stars. This commentary also included dividing cones into different parts by a plane, which led to developing the concepts of parabola, hyperbola and ellipse. She is known for writing "The Astronomical Canon". Hypatia worked with her father on commentary of Book III of the Almagest as a note of her father (Theon) says. Most of her writings were meant to be used as text books to help her students with difficult math concepts. …show more content…
At that time, Mathematics were divided into four branches: athematic, geometry, astronomy and music. The first two branches were pure, while the other two were applied. Hypatia according to Hesychius (Greek Biographer), worked in the first three. Hypatia taught both arithmetic and geometry for its own philosophic discipline. While she taught astronomy as practical and used it extensively to predict eclipses, construct calendars and aid navigation. Hypatia was popular lecturer on philosophical topics such as Neoplatonist, attracting loyal students and large audience. In addition, she lectured on famous scholars like Euclid and