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In later centuries the likes of Socrates and Plato would continue to invite women into their schools, but it was not until the fourth century AD that a woman mathematician founded her own influential school. Hypatia, the daughter of a mathematics teacher at the University of Alexandria , was famous for giving the most popular discourses in the known world and for being the greatest of problem-solvers. Mathematicians who had been stuck for months on a particular problem would write to her seeking a solution, and Hypatia rarely disappointed her admirers. She was obsessed by mathematics and the process of logical proof, and when asked why she never married she replied that she was wedded to the truth. Ultimately her devotion to the cause of rationalism caused her downfall, when Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, began to oppress philosophers,scientists, and mathematicians, whom he called heretics. The historian Edward Gibbon provided a vivid account of what happened after Cyril had plotted against Hypatia and turned the masses against her:
On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanely butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics; her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.
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