Hypatia

 

 

In 1996 Edmund Robinson wrote to the Types mailing list the message below. I have found the message while looking for something else and it has been sitting in my blog posts drafts folder since Dec 2014. 

It is amazing how Hypatia was such  a clever idea, but it disappeared without trace!

 

You can read about Hypatia, the philosopher and mathematician, in Wikipedia, like I just did. Again. But I find most of the literature about famous women written by man tend to go on and on about how exaggerated the claims about their cleverness were. They say the same about Ada Lovelace, about Emmy Noether, about Marie Curie. oh well.

Dear Colleagues,

This is to tell you about the new electronic library, Hypatia,
which has been implemented by my colleagues at QMW.
(Apologies for duplicate copies of this message.)

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Hypatia is at Queen Mary and Westfield College in London's East End.

Hypatia is a directory of research workers in computer science and
mathematics, and a library of their papers. It contains material which
has been published by placing it on a publicly accessible web or ftp
site, and a certain amount of "public domain" information about
authors (name, affiliation, email address and phone number, etc).
It also assembles bibliographic information.

Hypatia is not a web crawler, but a mirrored archive with a web
interface.  The archive is indexed by author and by research group,
and is equipped with a search engine.

Hypatia works by having a database of registered authors. Many of the
readers of this message will already be on the database. You can find
out if you are on our database simply by searching for yourself in
Hypatia. If you are not, then you can register and ensure that your
papers are lodged in Hypatia simply by filling in an electronic form,
which you can obtain via the Hypatia home page. If you are already
registered, then you can use the same form to correct any incorrect or
out of date information we have about you. (Inevitably, and despite
our best efforts, not all the information on Hypatia's database will
be correct.)

You can use the same form on behalf of your colleagues to help expand
Hypatia's coverage.

Hypatia would also like to encourage you to compile a BibTeX-format
database of your own papers. We hope that this will help people to
cite accurately the definitive versions of your work. On-line help for
this is available.

Hypatia has been implemented by Mark Dawson, who set up and ran the
popular mirrored archive at theory,doc.ic.ac.uk.  Mark has benefited
from discussions with Paul Taylor.

Hypatia is still under development and welcomes your comments,
suggestions, requests for help, and corrections to
<hypatia@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>.

Edmund Robinson,
Department of Computer Science,
Queen Mary and Westfield College,
University of London,
London E1 4NS