Every Recorded Student of Hypatia Was Christian, and a Christian Mob Killed Her

Hypatia of Alexandria was the most prominent mathematician of the late Roman Empire and, along with her father Theon, ran the city's mathematical-astronomical school in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. She edited Book III of Ptolemy's Almagest, where she introduced an improved method for the long divisions that astronomical work demanded, and wrote commentaries on Diophantus's Arithmetica and Apollonius's treatise on conic sections. Most of her own work is lost; what survives mostly comes through her students, who copied and corrected her editions.

The political context is the part schools tend to skip. Hypatia was a pagan Neoplatonist running a mathematics school in a city in the middle of an increasingly bitter feud between the imperial prefect Orestes and the new patriarch, Cyril. Orestes consulted Hypatia, which made her Cyril's problem. In March 415, during Lent, a Christian mob led by men called parabalani — minor church functionaries used as muscle — pulled her from her chariot in the street, dragged her into a church, and killed her. The contemporary Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus wrote that her death "brought no small disgrace, both upon Cyril and upon the Alexandrian church."

The odd footnote is her student list. Every named pupil of Hypatia we have on record was Christian. Synesius of Cyrene, who exchanged warm letters with her until his death, became bishop of Ptolemais in 410.