Hypatia of Alexandria
In the estimation of some,Hypatia was history's greatest woman.By all accounts attractively beautiful,dazzlingly brilliant,yet always modest and kind.In an age when woman were despised,She was History's first female mathematician,as well as the first first woman astronomer,inventor,and natural philosopher,Hypatia became the recognized head of the Neo-Platonist school of philosophy at Alexandria.
She was the last keeper of the flame of knowledge in the great Alexandria University-The museum-The centre of entire world's learning.As the daughter of the last head Professor of the museum,She practically grew up in the Great Alexandria Library,where the entire knowledge is kept,also she was a child genius,she was insatiable reader,Already by the age of twelve she was considered to have assimilated the sum total of all significant human knowledge.
Her life's mission was to preserve the ancient knowledge of the brilliant Greeks,and to to preserve their tradition of free thinking rational thought,but the world around her was in upheaval,and the Christians were consolidating their power,turning the mind of man away from reason,to faith.Everything not in line with Christian dogma was at the time being systematically eliminated by the Christians in power.Books in those days,before the advent of printing,were in form of hand written scrolls.In the year 391,The Great Alexandrian Library was burned down by Christians at the command of the Christian emperor Theodosius"The Great".
When the Christians destroyed the full collection of books of the Great Library of Alexandria,They also eliminated publicly-funded secular education,by shutting down museum for good.But Hypatia's mind still contained the best of what was lost in the flames,and so ,throughout the lest of her life,whenever some one was puzzled by a ploblem,since there were no more books to turn to.It was Hypatia that they turned.
The conflict which was occurring in Alexandria in Hypatia's time was clearly the conflict between church and state -a conflict which the Christians correctly assumed would be resolved when separation between Church and state was removed.Hypatia was the last obstacle to the church's goal of world domination,and the Christian mob killed in the most horrible way imaginable.When an example was made of Hypatia,no non Christians dared to challenge the authority of the Church(even in secular matter),and the separation between church and crumbled and fell,and the church ruled the World.For the millennium that followed no one ever again dared to say,or written,or even think anything that was not in line with views of the churchmen in power.
After her death,The scholars left Alexandria in disgust,and it ceased to be the World's centre of learning.The dark ages descended up on the world,and the human mind stagnated for a thousand years.When her books were rediscovered,at the end of the middle Ages,A new age of secularism and rational thought dawned up on the world,A period in History which we today know as the Renaissance,meaning,quite literally,The re-birth of the Classical age of Greek Wisdom.
