Hypatia
Hypatia (born 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy. She is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She is known to have written a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume "Arithmetica", which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's "Almagest", based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the "Almagest".
Women in the Catholic Church
Among the notable historical Catholic women teachers have been Trotula of Salerno the 11th-century physician, Dorotea Bucca who held a chair of medicine and philosophy at the University of Bologna from 1390, Elena Piscopia who, in 1678, became the first woman to receive a Doctorate of Philosophy, and Maria Agnesi, who was appointed around 1750 by Pope Benedict XIV as the first woman professor of mathematics.