Miko tries to correct some of the Enlightenment myths about Hypatia above, then adds to them:

But then suspicion is that the majority of the papyrus scrolls (not books, which didn’t exist at the time) were transferred to the Serapeum

Umm, no there isn’t. In fact, Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that there Serapeum no longer contained any libraries when he visited Alexandria in the late Fourth Century. There is no evidence of any remnants of the Great Library existing in Hypatia’s time.

the Serapeum, which was where the Christian monks took Hypatia when they burned her and which was destroyed in the resulting fire, so the Christians don’t get off too clean either.

This is also completely wrong. The Serapeum was burned by a Christian mob, but that was in AD 391 – ie a full 24 years before Hypatia’s murder.

The whole idea that Hypatia’s death had anything to do with her pagan religion or her learning is nonsense. See http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia-hollywood-strikes.html for a detailed analysis of the Hypatia of history and the one of myth. We atheists are supposed to be rationalists and are not supposed to peddle myths. We don’t like it when Christians do it (eg The Passion of the Christ) and se shouldn’t encourage it even when we like the myth in question.

Hypatia was not a martyr for science or atheism, she was a victim of city politics and nothing more.

And Hypatia likely believed something like that.

I think that she might have frowned upon preoccupation with Rachel Weisz’s appearance as concern with lesser emanations as opposed to the greater emanations of mathematical ideas.

But I think that she would have appreciated computers and their design principles.

http://www.agorathemovie.com

Oh, and Rachael does all her nude scenes (two) in the film. Thought some of you guys might like to know.

St. Catherine’s story has the noble Christian woman steadfastly defending her beliefs, then being tortured and executed on a wheel by the pagan king for not embracing the pagan religion. But current scholarship indicates that “Catherine’s” biography was filched from the actual philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, who, according to Socrates Scholasticus, “made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time….

“A pagan woman murdered by Christians for her beliefs was transformed into a Christian woman murdered by pagans for her beliefs. The perpetrators thereby became the victims,accomplishing a hideous slander in the process.”

HYUCK HYUCK!