As most everyone know Leonardo was a true polymath. Weapons design, archetecture, art, and so much more came from him.
Modern times have brought specialisation in most disciplines, but who among our current crop of humanity can match Leonardo for his intellectual and creative range. The Closest I can come is Richard P Feynman. Aside from his obvious contributions to atomic and quantum physics, he was a painter, interested in sociology, and even played the bongos and conga drums.
What are your nominations?
FML
I don’t know about current, but Buckminster Fuller was pretty well rounded.
Wikipedia has a list of polymaths, although most, if not all, are dead. Among the living, I would nominate Story Musgrave.
Come on…DaVinchi’s? Do over…I call!
Bad actor, worse director, even worse writer, even worse musician.
Masterful scam artist.
In your opinion.
This thread should be moved, anyway - there’s no factual answer.
David Brin? Peter Hamilton? Vernor Vinge?
Keep in mind that Leonardo didn’t actually sit down and build any of the devices he thought of.
Matching Leonardo? Good luck with that. IMHO a person like that comes along once every 500 to 1000 years. I’m a bit of a fanboy but he was truly off the charts.
At the risk of sounding like that patent clerk who reportedly claimed everything that could be invented, had already been done…
The world is just a harder place for a significant and prominent polymath to arise today, for several reasons, including:
-Science is a very, very much larger domain now - so it’s really difficult - maybe impossible - for one person to do it both broadly and deeply. You either specialise and if you’re lucky, you make some singular penetrating discovery, or you generalise and if you’re lucky, you become a science journalist. There just aren’t enough hours in a human lifetime to do it all, and do it thoroughly.
-Similar to the above, much of the big, low-hanging fruit has been plucked - doubtless there are still many discoveries to be made, but they tend not to be big ones like ‘gravity’ or ‘refraction’ any more.
-There are more fields to choose from now (not just in science, but in the arts, and in general) - so Leonardo wowed us by doing a good bit of everything on the menu at the time. The menu is much, much longer now, so even an effort as significant as Leonardo’s is going to appear somewhat dilute.
-There are so many other things the public audience finds interesting and distracting now - movies, celebrity, sport, music, politics, personal leisure, the internet, etc - so it’s just harder for someone even as prolific as Leonardo to be noticed above the background noise.
Spelling nitpick: it’s ‘da Vinci’.
I expect we’ll have the ‘da Vinci wasn’t actually his surname’ sidetrack any moment.
The modern world doesn’t really accept a Rennaisance Man. If you’re a writer, artist, programmer, singer, and bilingual, you’re never going to find a job that asks you to do everything you can do. I suspect that there are any number of polymaths in the modern world, but they’re not particularly noticeable as it’s not a sought after or widely published trait.
Besides myself, I believe that Nava has a history in comic book art besides being a chemist and programmer, as well as being multilingual. Mangetout’s website (http://www.atomicshrimp.com) would seem to indicate a rather diverse set of interests there as well.
Heh, It’s nice to be mentioned in the same thread as Leonardo, but I’m just a bumbler who doesn’t fully appreciate when it’s appropriate not to bother trying.
What you say about finding a job doing a bit of everything is very true - and it’s a problem I’m up against right now - I’m currently doing the one-man-band version of IT hardware/software/network/support/development for a smallish company which is on the brink of closure - finding a job that doesn’t require deep, specialist knowledge of a narrow field within IT is proving a bit tricky.
It goes back to the thing about there being more of everything now. There’s so much of everything, that nobody could ever do it all, and do it excellently - so the demand is mainly for people who do a few things, and do them well.