It is difficult to understate the lasting impact that the works of William Shakespeare have had on the world. One can scarcely go through a day without hearing a line from one of his sonnets or a quote from one of his plays. Indeed, many people (myself included) spout his prose verbatim without even realizing the source of the words they speak. Shakespeare's plays have been the subject of films from the earliest days of movie making, and the body of his work has been dissected, studied, argued and analyzed for literally hundreds of years. Not surprisingly, the plays of The Bard are finding a more and more prominent place in our entertainment venues as the millennium draws to a close.

Hypatia, known to many historians as the "Divine Pagan", was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 370 CE. She was the daughter of Theon, a Greek philosopher and geometrician, but we have no record of who her mother was. She was raised in an unusual manner for a Greek girl of her time. Her father schooled her in philosophy and mathematics. When she had learned all she could from him, Hypatia began to seek out the other scholars of Alexandria. Wearing a man's cloak, she would travel alone through the city to attend lectures and classes.