This is Women's History Month and a re-post year-to-day with some edits and updated commentary. Hypatia also appears on the link 17 Game Changers (you'd have to click the link at the bottom, and scroll down).
I dedicate this to all the young women, in math, martial arts and physics I've had the honor of teaching...hold fast to your dreams!
I dedicate this to all the young women, in math, martial arts and physics I've had the honor of teaching...hold fast to your dreams!
Hypatia (pronounced "hi-pay-see-a"): I read her name in the book Cosmos that I downloaded to my Kindle. I looked at the "old school" Cosmos show where Carl Sagan mentions her (starts at 3:25), and her sad fate. She's described as mathematician, astronomer, physicist, philosopher, quite lovely apparently and driver of her own chariot! She was a beloved teacher and by social practice a celibate, no doubt frustrating potential suitors of her day.
Interestingly as I had predicted to some casually offline at the time, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey had its detractors of the "young Earth" - humans with dinosaurs (think "The Flintstones") - faux debate between Evolution and so-called Intelligent Design variety. The odd and breathtaking display of hypocrisy in most of the trolls taking to the Internet - notably in 140 misspelled characters or less - created by the very science and modern physics they rail against; supporting pseudoscience in their destructive wake. As constituents, they are played by opportunistic politicians preying on their fears (science, climate change) for votes; the same who apparently have no inkling of how diplomacy is accomplished in the modern era. The backlash to their latest stunt comes from a usually friendly source. Through now quite obvious, overt bigotry, we are a living cartoon; a byword, a caricature of a former democratic republic: a reliable punchline on The Daily Show.
A certain part of the regressive reptilian portion of our minds attacks instinctively that which we think challenges our belief systems - and thus "us". Time and again, we've seen the razing of cities, the flaying of martyrs, the murder of not only the person, but new ideas that would take the species forward. This of course, all for adherence to a dogma. Supposedly through evangelism, it is meant as a "sell," and thus adherence is voluntary - zealotry and fanaticism turns it involuntary; totalitarian. Authoritarianism becomes our governance and its dogmatic ruling class the thought police. Sadly, I can't help but think if part of the mob that set upon Hypatia and ended her life so tragically were peopled by members of her own gender, suffering from what would in the 20th century gain the name "Stockholm Syndrome."
I often fear intolerance will rear its ugly head again and plunge us all over the abyss with it, as it did Alexandria, Egypt (this time, we won't just lose a library). They executed Hypatia...for the "crime" of thinking critically and independently of the lordship of patriarchal society. The saying goes "teach a woman and you teach a generation." The library, like Hypatia, soon expired after her forced passing. As Dr. Sagan states above, we "must not let it happen again."
For the sake of civilization's continuance, and the so-called "weaker sex" that nature favors to outlive men in a pompous, male-centered society: can we?
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, also known as George Santayana
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