Agora?

[Monad]

Looks interesting:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8059189.stm

I love Rachel Weisz

[DMB]

She is a brilliant actress, so it could be good.

[lpetrich]

I hope that it isn't heavy-handed and propagandistic, sort of like some atheist Chick Tract.

Checking on the portrayals of her in Hypatia of Alexandria, I find them totally absurd -- she would have looked more geeky than glamorous.

[premjan]

Hypatia rebuffed a suitor by showing him her menstrual rags, claiming they demonstrated that there was "nothing beautiful" about carnal desires.[14]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_of_Alexandria
She seems to have had suitors so perhaps not an utter geek.

[lpetrich]

Historian Richard Carrier has blogged on that upcoming movie: Weisz Is Hypatia (http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2009/06/weisz-is-hypatia.html)

According to Rueters (http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE54L07U20090522), the film sounds like an interesting pro-atheist myth, exaggerating certain realities to convey a pro-science message against maniacal religious fundamentalism. Reviewers who have seen early edits give the impression that Hypatia is depicted as an atheist, and as an active scientific investigator on the verge of proving heliocentrism. An intriguing, perhaps inspiring idea. But fiction surely.

Since she had been a Neoplatonist, she was almost certainly not an atheist. As RC says, "Neoplatonists did not accept the notion of sacred scripture or revealed dogmas, and were far more liberal minded (and arguably even more principled) than most Christian leaders of the day, but they were still mystics and believers." RC also noted that she, like many others of her generation, devoted herself to collecting past glories and commenting on them, rather than doing original research.

In Neoplatonism, the source of all reality is "The One", which is beyond all description. From it emanates Mind, which is also the Great Designer. Mind produces the World Soul, and that in turn produces the physical world. Matter is entirely passive, and receives forms from these higher entities. Some Neoplatonists went further, speculating about lots of additional divinities.

The Neoplatonist ideal was to try to reach back to The One by mystical contemplation, which meant that Hypatia would have frowned on certain male reviewers' slavering over Rachel Weisz's appearance. But I think that she would nevertheless be a good patron saint for female geeks.


She was lynched by those monks not for her studies, but for supposedly keeping the provincial governor and the archbishop from getting along with each other. Which was still an extremely dumb reason.

So she was something like 18th-cy. French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who was executed for reasons that had no connection with his researches, certainly not with his debunking of phlogiston. He was guillotined by the French revolutionaries for having been a tax collector, and one French revolutionary may have had a more personal gripe. Jean-Paul Marat had earlier applied to the French Academy, but Lavoisier dismissed some of his scientific work as worthless and rejected his application.

[Mediancat]

At first I thought this was about my former employer. This sounds a lot more interesting.

Rob

[lpetrich]

Hypatia rebuffed a suitor by showing him her menstrual rags, claiming they demonstrated that there was "nothing beautiful" about carnal desires.[14]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_of_Alexandria
She seems to have had suitors so perhaps not an utter geek.
She couldn't help but be good-looking and/or charming, perhaps.

But now that I think of it, I don't think that she'd like the movie industry -- Hollywood would seem too carnal for her tastes. But I think that she'd love modern science, especially mathematics. She might go absolutely ape over computer-algebra software like Mathematica, which I have on my home computer.

She'd have to do a LOT of catching up, however.

The place system for representing numbers
Zero -- the nothing number
Negative numbers -- reverse-direction numbers
Imaginary numbers -- sideways numbers
Algebra, variables, etc.
Analytic geometry
Functions
Calculus
....

Along with our habit of doing algebra-only derivations and proofs without Euclid-style geometrical diagrams, even for geometrical results.