Are there any polymaths like Da Vinci living today?

Factual Questions
21

Here’s a previous thread about polymaths:

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.

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Glenn Danzig–Rock ‘n’ Roll god and comic book publisher. In yer FACE, Leonardo!

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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.

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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).

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Actually, that description makes him sound like “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from the Dos Equis commercials.

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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.) 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

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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.

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How about 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 (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.

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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.

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In some ways, I’d put Frank Abagnale Jr. in this category.

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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.

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.

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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…

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It is also worth noting that he doesn’t often drink beer, but when he does, he prefers Dos Equis.

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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?

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What about 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.

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Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics before he went into singing and songwriting… :slight_smile:

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.

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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.

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You may be right. The following quote has been attributed to Gell-Mann:

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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.

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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.