Hypatia (c.370–415), Greek Neoplatonist philosopher who lived and taught in Alexandria. She was brutally murdered by a Christian mob because of her associations with the city’s prefect, who was in conflict with its aggressive archbishop, Cyril. She is said to have written commentaries on certain mathematical works, but the only certain trace of her literary activity is in her father Theon’s commentary on book 3 of Ptolemy’s Almagest, which Theon says is Hypatia’s redaction. Hypatia appears to have been a very popular philosophy teacher. She presumably professed a standard Neoplatonist curriculum, using mathematics as a ladder to the intelligible world. A good sense of her views can be gained from the essays, hymns, and letters of her pupil Synesius, bishop of Ptolemais and an eclectic man of letters. Hypatia’s modern fame can be traced back to the anticlericalism of the Enlightenment; see, e.g., chapter 47 of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1778). The most influential representation of her appeared in Charles Kingsley’s didactic historical novel Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face (1853). The facts that – according to ancient report – Hypatia was not only a brilliant person, but a beautiful one who aroused the erotic passion of (at least) one student, and that she was stripped naked before being slaughtered, seem to have contributed to the revival of interest in her. See also NEOPLATONISM. I.M.