From the Wiki article on Da Vinci, he’s described as an…
Let’s start with the fact that he was an exceptional painter. Could we pick off a currently living master who is also a phenomenal sculptor, inventor, etc… ?
I imagine that if we leave the arts out of it, we’d have an easier time picking somebody like him, no?
Dean Kamen is one of the worlds best inventors. He’s developed medical devices, The Segway, and currently robotic prosthetic.
He’s also a helicopter pilot. He owns two Raytheon 390 jets and pilots those.
All that, and all he can come up with is the Segway?
His work on the robotic prosthetic arm may transform a lot of lives. Iraq and Afgan war veterans are coming back with a staggering number of amputations.
Yeah, but Kamen runs a huge business full of engineers. He’s not some lone inventor in the basement coming up with breakthroughs. He’s a technical manager at this point and these things are really created by a team of people. Granted, he has some patents and is an inventor, but thats really not the same thing.
The difference between our time and Da Vinci’s time is that the complexity levels today demand a team-based approach while the things Renaissance men were working on were best done solo. Its also worth noting that DaVinci drew a lot of things but made very few. There’s a real difference between being a conceptualist and a producer of products. Kamen is a producer, like any busisness man. Its also worth noting that a lot of masterpeices in the art world really were produced by a in studio team where the master did a rough outline and some work and had his assistants fill in the rest. I think there’s quite a bit of myth and historical revisionism with these characters.
If you’re willing to stretch to “living in modern times” rather than “living today”, Richard Feynman qualifies. His primary strength was physics, of course (he won a Nobel Prize, after all), but he excelled at pretty much everything he set his mind to, and he set his mind to a lot of things. Just a small sampling:
*He was good enough at safecracking that he could open any lock at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project in a maximum of a few hours, and most of them he could open in seconds.
*He trained his sense of smell to a point that he could determine from smell alone whether someone had handled an object, and who it was.
*He had sufficient skill with bongo drums and painting to sell recordings and prints on their own merits.
*He could perform numerical calculations in his head faster and with higher precision than the (admittedly primitive) machines of the time.
Moe Berg- baseball player, lawyer, spy and polygot.
Yes and no. It’s true that he took an interest to safe cracking, and soon found out that the safes at Los Alamos were horribly shoddy (the combinations had high tolerance to wrong numbers, many researchers had left the safes on their default combination, many others kept their combinations written down somewhere near the safe). But that in itself doesn’t make him an expert safe cracker.
BTW, he did mention these troubling facts to the Los Alamos higher ups. As the (possibly apocryphal) story goes, they reacted promptly and decisively on his reasonable security concerns. By sending a circular memo telling everyone not to let Feynman anywhere near their safes :p.
Obviously, Leonardo was a brilliant man. He also had a major edge on comparably brilliant people around in the 21st century: he didn’t have to learn NEARLY as much to become a genius or expert in any field as a scientist would today.
In the Renaissance, it was feasible for a briliant , well-read, well educated man to learn almost everything there was to know about a wide range of subjects. Leonardo knew just about everything a man of his time could possibly know about astronomy, chemistry and physics. But you know, that probably isn’t much more than I know about those subjects, and I’m certainly no expert.
Today, there’s so much to learn, and so many subspecialties in every science, that one really CAN’T be a true Renaissance Man. You just CAN’T master every subject any more.
On the other hand, those sorts of tricks are a large part of what safecrackers do. And he did devise a method, based on study of how the locks were put together, of trying multiple combinations without re-entering the first numbers, which made his brute-force attacks (when necessary) much more efficient.
I agree with this. I’ve read several books lately about the development of science in the 16th and 17th century, and it is amazing how many pies some of those guys had their fingers in. Wren, Hooke, Halley - even Newton spent as much effort on religion and alchemy as he did optics and physics. But they had most of the smartest guys in the Western world meeting on a regular basis, and exchanging letters and manuscripts. Far more difficult these days.
I remember some years back folk touting David Byrne as a polymath, tho I’m not sure I see it. I suspect that today’s polymaths excel at various facets within a more limited arena, making their brilliance and achievements less generally recognized.
Plus, there’s Albert Schweitzer.
So, okay, after a hitch in the Army he earns his PhD in theology (with a doctoral thesis on purely secular philosophy, for some reason) and then works as a church deacon before moving up to a teaching post at university while still in his twenties; he then decides his true calling is to serve as a medical missionary, and so earns an MD (with a doctoral thesis on psychiatry, for some reason) before manning a field hospital where he could famously treat malaria and dysentery and et cetera in between performing surgery.
That’s a fine one-two punch of competence, but imagine for a second that you’re competent to earn doctorates in both theology and medicine; you’ll of course note that it doesn’t set you up with your own field hospital. So now imagine too that you’re a fine enough concert musician to keep wowing the crowds during charity fundraisers, having become a minor celebrity long before you started performing for donations. (Schweitzer’s expertise also extended to the construction of musical instruments; he literally wrote the book on proper mechanical principles for building the stuff he’d bang out melodies on – in his spare time from pioneering a new recording technique, naturally.)
Still, even accounting for the occasional fundraising concert back in Europe he’s got plenty of free time in Africa; there are only so many hours a week he’s needed in surgery. And so he becomes an award-winning writer – first authoring a book on history for some reason, and then slapping together well-received book after well-received book about modern-day problems until he won the Nobel Peace Prize – and then kept plugging away for international nuclear treaties on the world stage.
Still alive is Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann who, according to James Gleick (I think), rivaled Feynman for the title of “smartest person in the World”.
From this NY Times article:
And, from the addendum to his Nobel Prize biography we read:
Not mentioned above is the fact that he is said also to be an expert in various traditional middle-Eastern rug making (cant’ find a cite).
So, a man of many talents, at the least.
Linus Pauling is a good example from the modern era - he died in the 90s. He’s a titan of twentieth century science, winning his first Nobel prize for defining the nature of the chemical bond. He was the person who applied the applied the concepts of the quantum mechanics revolution in the early part of the 20th century to chemistry, rigorously defining how atoms bond to one another in molecules.
He also made seminal contributions to structure at the next level of organisation, characterising inorganic minerals and, famously, the alpha helix and beta sheet secondary structure of proteins. He was a pioneer in proto-genetics and molecular disease, publishing a landmark paper in the 50s that demonstrated the molecular basis of sickle cell anaemia.
His second Nobel prize was for Peace, for campaigning against nuclear weapons testing and proliferation. He was a prominent activist in this area after WWII, and received a shit load of aggravation for it from the US government, as you might expect for the times. Whatever one thinks of his stance here, it shows him to be a man who thought beyond the confines of the lab and wasn’t afraid to get involved in the mixer of world politics.
He’s an unusual example of genius in that he could clearly think on several different levels of scientific organisation and complexity - like Leonardo. He pioneered the theoretical study of chemical bonding at the interface between chemistry and physics, then described how proteins were structured - the interface of chemistry and biology. Above and beyond that, he was there at the beginning of molecular genetics, demonstrating that an abnormal protein could be responsible for a disease state, and could be inherited.
Like all true geniuses, he was also capable of talking complete shite. He became obsessed with vitamin C therapy in his later years as a treatment for the common cold (and cancer IIRC). Unfortunately, this foolishness is prominent in his legacy, taking place most recently in the 70s and receiving a lot of exposure in the popular press. It’s quite possible that the man in the street, to the extent which he has heard of Pauling at all, would know him for this ahead of his other work. His staggering achievements across different strata of science may of persuaded him that he could make innovative discoveries in medicine. It proved to be a step too far.
In any case, I’m sure Leonardo must have had a few awful sketches of Florentine beauties hidden out the back behind the shed 
Would Richard Branson count ? I mean, he’s probably not a *scientific *genius, but as polymaths go, he’s got street cred :
Holy crap, he’s Zaphod Beeblebrox!
How about Peter Weller? Cult movie star + popular art historian.
That’s not genius, that’s douchebaggery.
I’d say the odds are against polymaths today because of professionalization.
You can know a lot about a lot of things - maybe even do them pretty well, and even understand some of the jargon and a major work or two in each field. But what there isn’t enough time or energy for is to accumulate all the credentials, do all the background work, and really become part of the discourse community - ie: learn to think like more than 2 or 3 kinds of professional. A physicist AND a potter AND a musician, maybe. But add a mechanic OR a linguist OR a woodworker, and things are going to begin to come apart.
For one thing, there are going to be inherent contradictions. Some fields are going to demand not just a skillset, but a set of experiences/sensitivities/focuses that discourage or rule out experiences/sensitivities/focuses needed in other fields. Beyond that, some fields are more “closed”, others more “open.” Try cracking a blue-collar skilled trade if you’re a much-degreed verbal intellectual. It’s beyond learning the skills - you need someone to teach you and someplace to at least practice, and in a “closed” field, that depends on how well you fit into that community.
Y’all have overlooked Orly Taitz - dentist, lawyer and real estate agent!