Leonhard Euler
Agora
Güney Baver Gürbüz
Do you know who was the first female mathematician in recorded history?
If you have no idea, don’t worry. The movie review of the Math Chronicles for this week will certainly give you some clue. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar and written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil, Agora, a 2009 Spanish English-language historical drama film stars Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer in late 4th-century Roman Egypt, who investigates the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it in addition to important inventions.
In 391 AD, Alexandria is part of the Roman Empire, and Greek philosopher Hypatia is a teacher at the Platonic school, where future leaders are educated. Hypatia is the daughter of Theon, the director of the Musaeum of Alexandria. Hypatia, her father's slave, Davus, and two of her pupils, Orestes and Synesius, are immersed in the
changing political and social landscape. She rejects Orestes's love as she prefers to devote herself to science. Davus assists Hypatia in her classes and is interested in science. He is also secretly in love with her.
Meanwhile, as Pagans and Christians come into conflict, the Christians start defiling the statues of the pagan gods and cause one of their priests to burn in a fire. Then, the pagans, including Orestes and Theon ambush the Christians. However, in the ensuing battle, the pagans unexpectedly find themselves outnumbered by a large Christian mob. Theon is gravely injured, and Hypatia and the pagans are captured and sent into the Library of the Serapeum in Egypt. Afterwards, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I declares that the pagans are pardoned, and the Christians shall be allowed to take possession of the library. Hypatia and the pagans flee while trying to save the most important scrolls before the Christians overtake the library and destroy its contents. Davus chooses to join the Christian forces. He later returns with a gladius and sexually assaults Hypatia, but then, he begins to sob and offers his sword to her. However, she removes his slave collar and tells him that he is free.
Several years later, Orestes, now converted to Christianity, is the prefect of Alexandria. Hypatia, on the other hand, continues to investigate the motions of the Sun, the Moon, the five known "wanderers" (planets), and the stars. Some Christians ridicule her ideas by claiming that people far from the top would fall off the Earth if the Earth was a sphere. She, nevertheless, doesn’t cease working and works on algebraic equations and conic sections. She invented the astrolabe for ship navigation and devices for measuring the density of fluids.
Hypatia also investigates the heliocentric model of the solar system proposed by Aristarchus of Samos by having an object dropped from the mast of a moving ship which demonstrates that a possible motion of the Earth would not affect the motion, relative to Earth, of a falling object on Earth. However, due to religious objections against heliocentrism, the Christians forbid Hypatia to teach at the school. The Christians and the Jews come into violent conflict.
The leader of the Christians, Cyril, views Hypatia as having too much influence over Orestes and stages a public ceremony intended to force Orestes to subjugate her. Hypatia's former pupil, Synesius, now the Bishop of Cyrene, comes to her rescue as a religious authority counterweight but says he cannot help her unless she accepts Christianity; she refuses. Hypatia theorizes that the Earth orbits around the Sun in an elliptic orbit, not a circular orbit, with the Sun at one of the foci. Cyril convinces a mob of Christians that Hypatia is a witch, and they vow to kill her. Davus tries to run ahead to warn Hypatia, but she is captured. They strip Hypatia and are about to skin her alive until Davus persuades the mob otherwise, and they decide to stone her instead. When the mob goes outside to collect stones, Davus suffocates her to spare her the pain of being stoned and tells the mob that she fainted. Davus leaves as they begin to stone her.
The film, which debuted at Cannes, eventually became Spain’s highest-grossing film of the year and the recipient of 13 Goya Award nominations even though the box office numbers only recouped a little more than half of its $70 million budget.
References:
Ebert, Roger. “Agora Movie Review & Film Summary (2010): Roger Ebert.” Agora Movie Review & Film Summary (2010) | Roger Ebert, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/agora-2010.
“Agora (Film).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Apr. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(film).
“Agora.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 9 Oct. 2009, www.imdb.com/title/tt1186830/.