Hypatie d'Alexandrie
Mathematician and philosopher, head of the school of Alexandria.
Misconceptions
Hypatia was killed because she was a woman of science.
The oldest account, by Socrates Scholasticus (c. 440), praises her learning and her ease in public, then says that "envy" armed itself against her (the Greek says only phthonos, envy; the 1890 English translation adds "political"). She often met the prefect Orestes, in conflict with bishop Cyril, and a rumour blamed her for preventing their reconciliation. A band of Christians led by a reader named Peter dragged her from her carriage, stripped her in a church, killed her with potsherds, then tore her body apart and burnt it. Socrates adds that this is not in the spirit of Christianity and that the affair brought shame on Cyril. He does not say she was killed because she was a woman or a scholar. John of Nikiu (c. 690), pro-Cyril, gives another reason: she was a pagan who bewitched the prefect by magic, and her death is for him a victory over idolatry. The two accounts therefore disagree on the motive, and the one closest to the facts speaks of politics.
The Library of Alexandria burned with her.
None of our three witnesses speaks of a library: Socrates says she was dragged to a church and killed, then her limbs were burnt at a place called Cinaron; John of Nikiu has her dragged through the streets until she died and her body burnt. No books, no fire in a place of learning. The history of the great library of Alexandria is outside our corpus; what we can say is that the myth has no support in these texts. The confusion may come from the Serapeum, an Alexandrian sanctuary that held books, destroyed c. 391 under bishop Theophilus, more than twenty years before her death (outside our corpus).
The film Agora (2009) tells Hypatia's life.
Agora (Alejandro Amenábar) is a fiction inspired by her. The setting does come from the sources: her school, the prefect Orestes, bishop Cyril, Synesius, the murder by Christians. But our witnesses say nothing of her research: the discoveries the film gives her (in astronomy especially) are invented, and her death is softened compared with Socrates Scholasticus' account. The film is a possible way in, not a testimony.
Hypatia invented the astrolabe.
No text in our corpus credits her with inventing the astrolabe, and the instrument is older than she is (outside our corpus, a treatise on the astrolabe is attributed to her father Theon). In letter 15 Synesius asks her to have a hydroscope cast in brass for him, a graduated tube used to weigh water, and explains its shape: it is a different instrument. In letter 154 he sends her his speech On the Gift, written to present an astrolabe to a high official (Paeonius); that speech is not in our corpus. Only John of Nikiu, hostile, writes that she was devoted to "magic, astrolabes and instruments of music", but to slander her. She probably knew the instrument; nothing says she invented it.