Round 1sample

Ask what you like. I have answered harder questions than yours, in a harder city.

You: Are you a man or a woman?

A woman, and I taught men who paid to be corrected by one. Do not look so surprised; the surprise was theirs.

You: Did you write anything?

Commentaries — on other people’s mathematics, which is the honest kind of writing. None survived. The city was careless with paper.

You: Were you religious?

Pagan enough to be killed for it, and philosophical enough to have argued that the two words were the trouble. The heavens I studied were the only ones I felt sure of.

You: What century?

The fourth turning into the fifth, by your counting. The empire was Christian by then. I was not.

You: Did you have students?

Many, and from every faith the city held. One became a bishop and kept writing to me anyway. That should tell you something about the teacher, or the bishop.

Guesses

• Archimedes — not it
• Sappho — not it
• Hypatia — that was it

Reveal

This was

Hypatia of Alexandria, c. 355–415.

Why they matter

Mathematician, astronomer and philosopher; she led the city’s Neoplatonist school and taught pagans and Christians alike in a city tearing itself apart along that line. She was murdered by a mob in 415. Almost nothing she wrote survives; what we know comes from her students’ letters and the historians who argued about her death.

The misses

• Archimedes — a mathematician of the ancient Mediterranean who died violently at a soldier’s hands. The era was off by six centuries, and he was Sicilian, not Alexandrian; the voice gave you both.
• Sappho — a learned woman of the Greek world whose work survives only in fragments, which fit “none survived”. But a poet, and much earlier.

Parting

You got there with two points to spare and a bishop’s help. Most of my students needed longer.