Alexandria was once the seat of learning for the entire known world.
its library was one of the seven wonders.
Hypatia was the head of the neoplatonist school of philosophy, a leading mathematician, a pagan...and a woman.
Christian Saint Cyril's preaching against Hypatia (for being an uppity pagan woman) incited a mob led by fanatical Christian monks in 415 to attack Hypatia as she drove her chariot through Alexandria. They dragged her from her chariot and, according to accounts from that time, stripped her, killed her, shaved her living skin off with clamshells, stripped her flesh from her bones, scattered her body parts through the streets, and burned some remaining parts of her body in the library of Caesareum.
Hypatia's students fled to Athens, where the study of mathematics flourished after that. The Neoplatonic school she headed continued in Alexandria until the Arabs invaded in 642.
When the library of Alexandria was burned, used as fuel for baths, the works of Hypatia were destroyed
this is something i already knew, but some of the words are borrowed from here:
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/hypati1/a/hypatia.htm 
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