# Are there any polymaths like Da Vinci living today? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 3, 2010, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545 "2010-02-03T17:06:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/21 "2010-02-04T00:17:10Z")
Here’s a previous thread about polymaths: > **[Are there still multidisciplinary super geniuses](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=358730)** > > There used to be people that would do cutting edge research in various fields like Leonardo. He was an engineer, artist, medical investigator, architect, etc. However the scientific culture we have now is far more advanced and I don’t know if it is... I still think that Leonardo Da Vinci was overrated as a polymath. He didn’t accomplish that much more than a lot of current people, and it wasn’t that hard to do work in several fields at that time. Furthermore, I personally know a lot of people who are interested in a number of diverse fields and know a lot about each of them. I think that the amount of knowledge that they have and the diversity of it is probably close to that of Leonardo. They aren’t innovators in those fields that they know, but the state of knowledge is well beyond what it was in his time. What Leonardo did just wasn’t that all-fired surprising. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/22 "2010-02-04T00:17:38Z")
Glenn Danzig–Rock ‘n’ Roll god and comic book publisher. In yer FACE, Leonardo! ---
**Author:** ![Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/cc9497/32.png) [@Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/23 "2010-02-04T00:22:23Z")
How about Dov Gabbay? He’s currently the second most published computer scientist of all time, and aiming for the number one spot. His list of publications is 43 pages long. You literally cannot get a book in my field without his name on it. He’s also done work in linguistics, philosophy, history of mathematics, and cognitive science. In addition, he’s also a rabbi, and currently commissioned by the Israeli government studying the logic of the Talmud. Along similar lines, Wilfrid Hodges is a very famous model theorist and an expert in medieval Arabic. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/24 "2010-02-04T00:24:36Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. Meeting is at least as easy now as it was then, thanks to air travel (PhDs routinely travel to conferences all over the world), and exchanging letters and manuscripts is far, far easier: That’s what the Internet was created for (well, that and porn, of course). ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/25 "2010-02-04T00:29:02Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > He has been known to correct the Ukrainian pronunciation of native Ukrainians and disparage the Swahili of Kenyans. > > That’s not genius, that’s douchebaggery. Actually, that description makes him sound like “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from the Dos Equis commercials. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/26 "2010-02-04T00:32:14Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > 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. Actually, Feynman found that it was possible to read the combination on an open safe, so during office meetings when the safe was open he’d casually stand with one arm over the safe door spinning the dial apparently randomly and checking the tumbler positions with the other. Once he figured out the safe combination he’d write it down on a piece of paper stored inside the lock on his safe. When asked to open up someone else’s safe (because they were TDY or otherwise unavailable) he’d go back to his office on the pretense of needing tools, check the combo, then take ten minutes or so to open the safe of interest (with everyone else out of the office) to make it look as if he’d been a “safe cracker”. And yes, when he brought the attention to management, their response was to circulate a memo telling people to keep their safes closed and locked while Dick Feynman was in the office. Back to the o.p., I was going to mention Linus Pauling. Francis Crick was also notable in several fields including molecular biology (of course), linguistics, neurobiology, and cognition. Stephen Wolfram has worked in fields from particle physics, cosmoology, to computational theory and cellular automata. Martin Gardner (of the “Mathematical Games” feature in _Scientific American_ for years) has interests in recreational mathematics, philosophy, skepticism and pseudoscience, and literature (his _Annotated Alice_ and _Annotated Hunting of the Snark_ are must haves in any well-equipped library). Bertrand Russell certainly deserves a nod. However, the person I’d pick out as a first rate polymath comparable to Di Vinci is Douglas Hofstadter, best known as the author of _Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid_ and _I Am A Strange Loop_. (Another of his books, _luid Concepts & Creative Analogies_, was the first book sold on [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com).) In addition to his work in physics and computational theory, he’s worked in cognition, visual art and ambigrams, music composition, language, and literature translation, as well as being a Pulitzer Prize author. While Leonardo Di Vinci was certainly a noteworthy polymath of his day, it should be recognized that many of his concepts were not workable as he outlined them, and he did not have the basic theory to explain why they worked. He’s also highly celebrated without recognition for those he derived concepts and principles from, and of course, is one of the first polymaths for which documentation of his researches and interests exists virtually _in toto_ instead of piecemeal or as related by other authors in fragmentary form. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![infinitii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e8c25b/32.png) [@infinitii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/infinitii)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/27 "2010-02-04T00:50:08Z")
Again, not currently alive, but R. Buckminster Fuller certainly deserves a nod. A lot of his inventions and ideas stemmed from a central philosophy, but it doesn’t detract from the extensive research and work he did in those fields to come up with those ideas. Off the top of my head, he did major work in architecture (the ‘Bucky’ dome), cartography (he came up with his own projection, the Fuller projection or the Dymaxion projection, which is still the only one without any distortions that I know of), mathematics (his ‘Synergetics’, which I don’t really get completely but I think it is worthwhile), economics (various studies disproving Malthus), art (his ‘Tetrascroll’ was part of a project that combines a famous author with a famous artist, and he did his all by himself), poetry (he wrote and published poetry, like all of his writing though, it’s difficult to comprehend), engineering (his book “Critical Path” has a number of engineering projects that he had planned, but he accomplished many during his lifetime as well), etc. He had several honorary doctorates and was a much sought after lecturer. An interesting guy at the very least. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/28 "2010-02-04T01:01:20Z")
How about [Winston Churchill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill)? He was a historian and writer (the Nobel Prize was for literature), artist, hobbyist bricklayer, army officer, orator and statesman. Or take [Story Musgrave](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_Musgrave) (although note that I’ve nominated him in previous threads on the same subject). According to Wikipedia, his hobbies include chess, flying, gardening, literary criticism, poetry, microcomputers, parachuting, photography, reading, running, scuba diving and soaring. And he’s been employed as a mathematician, surgeon, test pilot and astronaut. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/29 "2010-02-04T01:40:39Z")
> [@](#): > > the Fuller projection or the Dymaxion projection, which is still the only one without any distortions that I know of) Nitpick: All projections of the globe onto a flat map have distortions. Fuller’s projection just has fewer distortions than most. But of course, it pays for that by not leaving the map connected, which you might consider in itself to be a huge distortion. No matter what you do, something’s got to give. ---
**Author:** ![ataraxy22](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ataraxy22/32/307_2.png) [@ataraxy22](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ataraxy22)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/30 "2010-02-04T03:55:52Z")
In some ways, I’d put [Frank Abagnale Jr.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale) in this category. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/31 "2010-02-04T04:44:12Z")
> [@Capt. Ridley](#): > > [Dov Gabbay]'s also done work in linguistics, philosophy, history of mathematics, and cognitive science. Gabbay works on topics in theoretical computer science involving logic and computation, which certainly draws on computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science, but IMO is more interdisciplinary than multidisciplinary. Just working in an interdisciplinary field doesn’t make you a polymath. Also, while he’s an editor of a monograph series on history of logic, I’m not aware of any original research he’s done himself in history of mathematics. > [@Chronos](#): > > [Richard Feynman] 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. As I recall from Feynman’s autobiography, this was a pretty minor parlor trick, not a polymath-level achievement. Feynman emphasized that although we tend to be amazed at dogs’ ability to find clues by scent, it’s really much less difficult than we might think for humans to do the same, if we’ll only get our noses right down onto an object the way dogs do. Pick up your own computer keyboard right now and stick your nose against the keys: the warmth and the odor are very clear signals that it’s been recently handled. ---
**Author:** ![Dinsdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/97f17d/32.png) [@Dinsdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinsdale)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/32 "2010-02-04T14:35:35Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Meeting is at least as easy now as it was then, … Very good point. But I am not aware of a modern analog to the Royal Society, where the goal was knowledge through experimentation/demonstration, without regard to specialties. Leonardo is an interesting fellow. The volume of his artistic output is quite low - they guy had the hardest time finishing anything. But what he did finish was of tremendous quality. But his bread-and-butter was as a military engineer. And he pursued various other interests in diverse fields. How about as “polymaths” some of today’s tremendously successful computer guys. Bill Gates, who is now primarily engaged in humanitarian efforts. Or his old partner, who participates in rock music and professional sports ownership at the highest levels. I believe other wealthy techies have put their wealth and efforts into fields such as private space exploration… ---
**Author:** ![Yossarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/9de0a6/32.png) [@Yossarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yossarian)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/33 "2010-02-04T16:49:51Z")
> [@KarlGauss](#): > > 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](http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/08/magazine/the-man-who-knows-everything-murray-gell-mann.html): > > Even Murray Gell-Mann’s credentials – a director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, adviser to the Pentagon on arms control, collector of prehistoric Southwest American pottery, amateur ornithologist, to name a few – can’t prepare a visitor for the full extent of his erudition. He pronounces “Chagas” as it is heard in Brazil. He has been known to correct the Ukrainian pronunciation of native Ukrainians and disparage the Swahili of Kenyans. > > And, from the addendum to [his Nobel Prize biography](http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1969/gell-mann-bio.html) we read: > > Gell-Mann’s interests extend to historical linguistics, archeology, natural history, the psychology of creative thinking, and other subjects connected with biological and cultural evolution and with learning. Much of his recent research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on the theory of complex adaptive systems, which brings many of those topics together. > > 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). It is also worth noting that he doesn’t often drink beer, but when he does, he prefers Dos Equis. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/34 "2010-02-04T17:37:03Z")
> [@Jormungandr](#): > > Moe Berg- baseball player, lawyer, spy and polygot. > > [Moe Berg - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_Berg) Didn’t someone say (it might even be in that Wiki entry somewhere) that Moe Berg spoke 12 languages, and could strike out in any of them? ---
**Author:** ![Kiber](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kiber/32/317_2.png) [@Kiber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiber)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/35 "2010-02-04T17:43:07Z")
What about [James Cameron](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron)? In school, he studied English, Physics and Philosophy. He then went on to essentially devote his life to combining science and art. Obviously - he’s a movie director. But he also wrote many of the movies that he’s made. He’s invented numerous technologies associated with those movies. And the creativity he’s displayed (see Avatar) is pretty impressive from an artistic point of view. In addition to his movie-related technologies, he’s also seriously pursued oceanography. I don’t know if he qualifies as a true polymath - but he definitely has serious credentials (if not formal degrees, then certainly qualifications) in both the sciences and the arts. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/36 "2010-02-04T18:18:12Z")
Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics before he went into singing and songwriting… 🙂 Feynman lays out his safecraking very simply in his autobiography. Most safes were like the old high school locker combination locks -concentric tabs on the inside, so you turned all the way 2 times to the first number, back around once to the second, then directly the other way to the third. IIRc there were 30 numbers, and most locking filing cabinets would sit there open. They either stuck on the last number, or people neglected to spin the dial after opening; so there was one number right away. he would lean against the drawer talking and appear to just be fiddling with the knob; but as the other post says, he figured once you found the last, you could set thefirst number, and just try midle-last combinations; 30 or 50 or whatever. The tolerance was such you only needed to do every other number . So he had something like 15^2 or 25^2 combinations to try in sequence - a decent number but not impossible. He’d make notes when he got back to the office, and pick up where he left off next time he was in that office. Eventually he had a list of everyone’s combinations. I suppose his gift was that he could talk and do other things while fiddling with the lock. When the big shot left abruptly and told no one the safe combination, they had to call a local locksmith who “knew how to crack safes”. After the guy need a bit of privacy to do the crakcing, Feynman asked how he did it. The guy said - “Oh, the safe was still on the default factory combination. I just had to waste a half an hour to make my fee seem reasonable.” Most people old enough will remember Feynman as the guy who investigated the Challenger failure; during a news conference he put some O-ring material in a clamp in ice water. when he took it out and unclamped it, it did not bounce back; thus demonstrating how poor the seal on the solid booter segments could be. I agree; a smart guy in the 1600s or so could be a “learned man”. There was a lot less to learn, and a lot less competition. Yes, really smart guys like Leonardo could go places despite their original lwo station in life, but even decently smart people were more likely to end up where they started, at the bottom of the social ladder without education. A smart pig-farmer probably just gets beat up by the other pig farmers, especially if he corrects their ukrainian or swahili. Da Vinci too is best known for starting a lot of things and never finishing, and having great ideas that never really worked - like flying machines. They had to nag him to finish the Last Supper over a couple of years or more; and he did it directly on the concrete wall, so the moisture seeping in ruining it within decades. I like to think of da Vinci as lucky enough to be very smart at the right place and time - like the guys who wrote Microsoft Basic or Visicalc or Linux when it was possible to write a million-“selling” program without a huge army of coders; or the Wright brothers, who showed that what little physicists thought they knew about aerodynamics of wings was wrong; or Edison, or Newton, or Einstein who could turn physics around 180 degrees working with a pad of paper in his desk between bits real work. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/37 "2010-02-04T18:23:25Z")
> [@](#): > > Very good point. But I am not aware of a modern analog to the Royal Society, where the goal was knowledge through experimentation/demonstration, without regard to specialties. Well, for starters, there’s the Royal Society. The difference is not that the Royal Society diminished in any way, but just that there are now so many other venues for scientific collaboration, rather than a few dominant ones. ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2010, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/38 "2010-02-04T22:07:54Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > That’s not genius, that’s douchebaggery. You may be right. The following quote has been attributed to Gell-Mann: > [@Gell-Mann (supposedly)](#): > > If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have been surrounded by midgets ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2010, 8:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/39 "2010-02-05T08:59:40Z")
> [@Kiber](#): > > What about [James Cameron](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron)?[…] > > I don’t know if he qualifies as a true polymath - but he definitely has serious credentials (if not formal degrees, then certainly qualifications) in both the sciences and the arts. In that line, I think it’s probably people from the technical side of film-making where you’ll find the guys who combine art and science, with a bit of writing and directing thrown in there. Like Peter JAckson, or Richard Taylor from WETA Workshop. Or Tim Burton - writer, director, stop-motion animator, artist. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2010, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545/40 "2010-02-05T12:15:45Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > In that line, I think it’s probably people from the technical side of film-making where you’ll find the guys who combine art and science, with a bit of writing and directing thrown in there. Like Peter JAckson, or Richard Taylor from WETA Workshop. Or Tim Burton - writer, director, stop-motion animator, artist. Heh. You know who else has a bit of writing and directing thrown in there? A seven-time international bodybuilding champ who parlayed his knack for light comedy into becoming the world’s biggest movie star before he decided to win election after election for Governor. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-polymaths-like-da-vinci-living-today/527545.md?page=3)