Are there still multidisciplinary super geniuses

Factual Questions
41

I think you need a better definition of ‘Renaissance Man’. I don’t think it’s enough to just be relatively accomplished in several different disciplines. I think you have to make significant contributions to several fields.

For example, take Richard Feynman. Sure, he was a physicist who also cracked safes and played the bongos. But was he a world-class bongo player? Did he discover new techniques for safe cracking that are used today?

By the standard of, “really smart guys who do lots of things”, I’m guessing half the people on this board are ‘renaissance men’. Most smart people do a lot of things. It’s not uncommon for brilliant people to dabble in painting, for example. But how many physicists have paintings in the Louvre?

Leonardo is always presented as the prototypical example of the Renaissance man. He created some of the greatest paintings in the history of man. He also made tremendous discoveries in anatomy. He built the first robot, and the first armored tank. He was employed as a military engineer, and made significant discoveries in the nature of flight, including a design for a hang glider that would have flown had he built it.

By comparison, most of the contemporary ‘Renaissance men’ just don’t measure up. Ben Stein is a smart guy, but he’s a mediocre actor, and his ‘comedian/game show host’ schtick is really just parlaying his personality into a bit of fame. He’s basically a guy with a good education who’s a good writer and has a unique enough personality to make him stand out a bit in entertainment.

And while Asimov was a very prolific writer and wrote on numerous subjects, he never made significant contributions to any of those fields, and his wide-ranging subject matter may just be due to being a workaholic with good research skills.

I think the problem today is that it just takes too long to learn enough about any modern field of science to be able to contribute significantly to more than one or two. The fields have become too arcane and require too much specialized knowledge. In Leonardo’s day, a man of insight could make breakthroughs in many fields, simply because there was a lot of basic knowledge which had yet to be discovered. And a fundamental insight could lead to breakthroughs in multiple fields.

42

There’s a couple of real howlers in that Wikipedia ‘Polymath’ list. For example:

Steven Seagal – actor, aikido expert, environmentalist, musician, and tulku

Oh, please. He’s a lousy actor who only got a job because of his aikido. He plays guitar - whoop de do. It’s not an accomplishment to be an ‘environmentalist’. A ‘tulki’ is apparently a reincarnation of a lama, and I gather it’s just a title someone puts on you.

Ayn Rand - Philosopher, Playright, author

Uh, author and playright kind of go together. Lots of authors are playrights. She’s basically an inventer of her own philosophy, and chose to expose it by writing fiction. This does not make one a polymath. And having read various Rand biographies, she was a very provincial woman whose knowledge was not particuarly wide-ranging outside of her special interest.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski – pianist, Prime Minister, diplomat

Um, can we take it as a given that people who rise to the top of politics had another career? There are a whole bunch of people on that list like this. Or is Ronald Reagan a polymath because he was an economist, actor, union leader, and President? How about George Bush? Oil executive, baseball team owner, fighter pilot, governor, president. Wow, a super genius!

I’m guessing a lot of the people on that list have simply been added by fans who are convinced that their favorite person is the best evar.

43

Even Leonardo da Vinci is overrated as a “Renaissance man,” even though he’s the standard example of one. Yes, he was a great artist. He was a great anatomist only in the sense that he made many drawings of the internal organs, in the process discovering much about how they looked. He was a military engineer in the sense that he drew pictures of military fortifications which were then constructed. He was an inventor in the sense that he drew pictures of inventions which nobody could construct for long afterwards. He didn’t do any of those professions (except for art) in the sense in which people do them today.

44

Conway Twitty (not his birth name) not only had a trememdous string of hits as a songwriter and performer, but was a good enough baseball player to be offered a major league contract, which he declined. Maybe not Leonardo, but I’m impressed.

45

Would you agree that Noam Chomsky’s significant contributions to linguistics primarily and secondarily to political discourse (even if you think his contributions are wacko) qualifies him?

Daniel

46

Disappointed to note the absence of James Burke on that Wiki, I suppose I should add him.

47

I’ve had fun imagining what our contemporary thinkers and scholars would say to our ancient polymaths.

Fun Thought: Could we put Billy Graham in the same room with Martin Luther?

Fun Fact: It is widely accepted that quantum mechanics is a reality to our world. Einstein refused to believe it.

Fun Question: Is the genius of a person measured in having the idea or being able to elucidate it in a concrete way?

48

Left Hand of Dorkness writes:

> Would you agree that Noam Chomsky’s significant contributions to linguistics
> primarily and secondarily to political discourse (even if you think his
> contributions are wacko) qualifies him?

I (and some other people with more standing in linguistics than me) think his contributions to linguistics are somewhat overrated. His contributions to the field are more often in the form of interesting insights which his own attempts to extend into full theories just couldn’t be made to work right. It was other people who figured out better ways to extend these insights. Chomsky did much less detailed application of his theories to real examples of language than you mght think. I’m less certain of his political work, but it appears to me that the same might be true there - interesting insights which don’t really work as full-fledged theories.

49

Wow…and whatever snap conclusions one might make about literature as an academic subject, a reputable master’s program is not a “gut”. I knew a comp. lit Ph.D. student at UCLA and he was one of the smartest guys I ever met.

50

Interesting–but I think we need to discuss from a sociological perspective, not from a within-the-field perspective. We won’t find anyone, I think, who lacks detractors within his field (Einstein possibly excepted). Chomsky is probably the best-known linguist of all time; whether he is well known as a Big Idea Man or as a Nuts-And-Boltser is not as important, I’d say.

Daniel

51

What is it about being a political partisan of some stature that makes you a polymath? I don’t get it. Lots and lots of people parlay success in one field into fame, and that doesn’t make them a polymath. And frankly, I don’t think it takes special skill or insight to become a political writer. Is Ann Coulter a polymath because she’s a lawyer and also a popular conservative author? Hardly.

The kind of people I think about when I hear ‘polymath’ would be people more like Condoleeza Rice - An expert on the Soviet Union, she was an advisor to the Reagan White House while in her 20’s. She went on to be a Provost at Stanford, and now Secretary of State. But what makes her a polymath is that she’s also a concert-level pianist who has played Carnegie Hall. It’s the world-class skills in very different fields that makes one a polymath.

Steve Martin almost qualifies. Not only is he a world-class standup comic, but he’s a great writer, a great actor, and he is capable of playing the banjo with the best of them.

A better example from entertainment would be Jamie Foxx. In high school he was a star quarterback, and I’ve heard he could have gone to college on a football scholarship. Except that he was so talented as a pianist that he went to college on a scholarship to study classical piano. Then he decided to become a standup comic, and turned out to be very good at that too. Then he went on to be a comedic actor, and excelled at that as well. Then he became a dramatic actor, and shot right to the top of the field, winning the best actor Oscar last year and being nominated as best supporting actor in the same year. And when he tried singing in ‘Ray’, he was so good at that that it was hard to tell his voice from the real Ray Charles, who is one of the great singers of the modern era.

He would be an ‘entertainment polymath’, I guess.

52

Lawyer and pundit are pretty closely related; scientist and pundit are not, I’d say. If Coulter had revolutionized genetics, I’d consider her to be a polymath (as I earlier said about Buckley).

Rice and Martin are both great examples, although I’m not sure that either of them are as preeminent in any field as Chomsky is in linguistics. Jamie Foxx? I don’t know enough about him to say.

Daniel