22 Influential Women You Probably Didn't Learn About in School

17. Hypatia

If you’ve ever seen The Good Place, you know why a chance to chat with Hypatia would be a huge deal. Hypatia lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 4th and 5th centuries. According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, she is “the first female Greek mathematician of whom we have substantial information,” and was also an astronomer and philosopher, following the Neoplatonist school of thought. Students came from throughout the Mediterranean and beyond to study with Hypatia. She was also a pagan—and was brutally murdered by a Christian mob that blamed her for preventing Orestes, the Roman prefect, from reconciling with Cyril, the city’s Patriarch.