Polymath Quotes

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.

It is difficult to realize the true Way just through sword-fencing. Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things.

The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.

In the construction of houses, choice of woods is made. Straight un-knotted timber of good appearance is used for the revealed pillars, straight timber with small defects is used for the inner pillars. Timbers of the finest appearance, even if a little weak, is used for the thresholds, lintels, doors, and sliding doors, and so on. Good strong timber, though it be gnarled and knotted, can always be used discreetly in construction.

The 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by the end of it the specialist had evolved. The consequence is that today everyone is a mere technician, even the artist...

Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals (referring to polymaths) required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.

Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence of the more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath Philo Judaeus—a Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard but beheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows: A more perfect archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing, and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require the mediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as the truth of things.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we pride ourselves on providing holistic solutions. Businesses have problems, cities have problems, society has problems… and we have solutions to those problems. And me being a polymath and the founder of the company means that polymath spirit is embedded in the company’s nature. We like to solve all kinds of problems and present all kinds of solutions across various industries.

I firmly believed that with the breadth of knowledge now makes it impossible for someone to be a polymath in the 20th century-until I met Dr.Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad.

Being a polymath makes me a better investor and a better CEO. Because I have multiple interests and multiple skill sets that span across various industries and topic areas, I’m often able to approach investments from a place knowing, from a place of experience and with a sense of authority. Whether it’s IP, Patents, Transportation, Music, Education or Wellness…. I’ve got some background in it so I’m able lead Mayflower-Plymouth with investing in any or all of these effectively.

Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong.

One of the best examples of a polymath is Leonardo da Vinci. Born in Italy in 1452, Leonardo was a sculptor, painter, architect, mathematician, musician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, botanist, geologist, cartographer and writer. Although he received an informal education that included geometry, Latin and mathematics, he was essentially an autodidact, or a self-taught individual.

I spent most of my life trying to specialize myself. I went to theater school, film school, music school, mime school ... Finally, I was able to gather enough knowledge to build the confidence to create my own work, that goes utterly against the sense of specialization.

There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.

James Croll, the Scottish janitor and self-taught polymath whose theories concerning Earth’s orbit provided the first plausible explanation for how ice ages might have started.

Depicting rational economic man as an isolated individual – unaffected by the choices of others – proved highly convenient for modelling the economy, but it was long questioned even from within the discipline. At the end of the nineteenth century, the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen berated economic theory for depicting man as a ‘self-contained globule of desire’, while the French polymath Henri Poincaré pointed out that it overlooked ‘people’s tendency to act like sheep’.31 He was right: we are not so different from herds as we might like to imagine. We follow social norms, typically preferring to do what we expect others will do and, especially if filled with fear or doubt, we tend to go with the crowd. One

father is a polymath, a real renaissance man: academic, sporting, at ease in the city, more at ease in the great outdoors. He’d embraced three adopted kids…and I’m the one who didn’t live up to his expectations.

My definition of Fun Game is when everyone wins.

The ideal Lexivist should be a polymath or at least interested in many different areas and fields. When it comes to creativity, whether it is in CDT or art, the transformative effect which stems from our creations can have a liberating and inspirational effect on our very selves. What we excel at, whether that is business or politics, should carry a radiant and positive effect not just on the development and progression of the self but also to lead by example for those who surround us. To inspire them to do the same if they so choose.

...interested in everything and nothing else

There exists in some individuals more than enough talents, expertises, or greatness for more than three people.

Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman and polymath, knew that a balanced, liberal education for all was essential for the proper flourishing of the American dream.

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Regression to the mean was discovered and named late in the nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin and a renowned polymath

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The future belongs to the polymaths.

polymath:

Ibn Khaldun discussed the calculations of the ninth-century astrologer and polymath al-Kindi regarding the predestined end of the ‘Abbasid dynasty.

You can become 1) more creative by 2) getting new inputs by 3) enjoying new experiences to 4) make new connections to 5) solve your problems with polymathic thinking.⁣

Polyphiloprogenitive The sapient sutlers of the Lord Drift across the window-panes. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. Superfetation of to en, And at the mensual turn of time Produced enervate Origen. A painter of the Umbrian school Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptized God. The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set The Father and the Paraclete. . . . . . . The sable presbyters approach The avenue of penitence; The young are red and pustular Clutching piaculative pence. Under the penitential gates Sustained by staring Seraphim Where the souls of the devout Burn invisible and dim. Along the garden-wall the bees With hairy bellies pass between The staminate and pistilate, Blest office of the epicene. Sweeney shifts from ham to ham Stirring the water in his bath. The masters of the subtle schools Are controversial, polymath.

development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre. Because of the strong pressures for social conformity both by the government and by peer groups in the United States—and even more so in the Soviet Union, Japan and the People’s Republic of China—I think that such countries are producing proportionately fewer polymaths.

His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came at you like a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big, pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect. (About Philip Seymour Hoffman)

Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.” Like polymath inventors, Eastman and Cousins take ravenously from specialists and integrate

The greatest thing about our times is that you don't need permission to express yourself the way you wish. Sometimes people tell themselves they can't do it, because they're missing this or that, but historically, specialization is a recent convention. Most of us are born natural polymaths.

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.” — Benjamin Franklin, early American political leader, scientist, and polymath

He used his intellect as he used his legs: to carry him somewhere else. He studied astrology, astronomy, botany, chemistry, numerology, fortification, divination, organ building, metallurgy, medicine, perspective, the kabbala, toxicology, philosophy, and jurisprudence. He kept his interest in anatomy and did a dissection whenever he could get hold of a body. He learned Arabic, Catalan, Polish, Icelandic, Basque, Hungarian, Romany, and demotic Greek.

This was even harder to accept for 200,000 Black soldiers who had returned from military service in France and felt entitled to be full citizens. “The great war in Europe, its recoil on America, the ferment in the United States, all conspired to break up the stereotyped conception of the Negro’s place,” wrote James Weldon Johnson, the literary polymath, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Cities erupted in violent attacks on Black property and life. And as vigilante executions by a hangman’s noose continued without sanction in the South, Congress could not muster enough votes to pass an anti-lynching law.

Against all odds, Bethlem survived. The Bishopsgate building endured the Civil War, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London a year later, after which the hospital’s governors realised that it needed a new home. In 1676 ‘New Bedlam’ opened in Moorfields, with patients transferred to a ‘palace beautiful’ designed by the genius polymath Robert Hooke.

Typical was the French polymath Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1883: Those liberals who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror.…But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress.

Growth is exponential, when your strategy is combinatorial.

your chosen topic. You could solicit an expert’s advice regarding the area of your interest. You can listen to podcasts.

However, the priority is to maximize the number of good resources at your disposal.

books are likely to be the most efficient resources of them all. Try finding some appropriate books through Amazon, but consider other mediums like blogs, courses, etc.

different books from Amazon to learn about a single topic. Instead, it’s more beneficial to choose one or two of the best books.

There is no single way to be a multipotentialite.

A polygogue is an enlightened, polished, and urbane competent man." - Philip Cairfax

There is always a contradiction between religion and common sense.

Multidimensional problems require multidimensional thinking. To find simple, actionable, single-task solutions, we need multidimensional thinkers to strike at the heart of things.

In the history of ideas, it's repeatedly happened that an idea, developed in one area for one purpose, finds an unexpected application elsewhere. Concepts developed purely for philosophy of mathematics turned out to be just what you needed to build a computer. Statistical formulae for understanding genetic change in biology are now applied in both economics and in programming.

Richard Alther's Bedside Matters offers readers an insightful and moving end-of-life narrative in the spirit of Paul Harding's Tinkers and William Gaddis's Agapē Agape. Challenged by physical decline and family intrigue, Walter transcends his corporeal prison to find larger meaning in art, philosophy, and literature. A work of depth, carefully wrought with nuance and delicately wrapped in wisdom and humor, Bedside Matters serves up a worthy exploration of and an antidote to the shortcomings of our material age. — Jacob M. Appel, author of Millard Salter's Last Day.

The first known European book to describe the use of cryptography was written in the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan monk and polymath Roger Bacon. Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic included seven methods for keeping messages secret, and cautioned: “A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.

Knowing what we want to learn, along with the learning plan we created, will be crucial to how we filter our resources. Doing so will also help you financially, since you won’t need to purchase ten

The truth is that you aren’t lacking a destiny or purpose. There is a very good reason for your insatiable curiosity: you’re someone who’s going to shake things up, create something novel, solve complex, multidimensional problems, make people’s lives better in your own unique way. Whatever your destinies are, you can’t step into them while stifling your multipotentiality. You must embrace it and use it.

This book is for the people who don't want to pick a single focus and abandon all their other interests. It's for the curious, or those who find delight in learning new things, creating and morphing between identities.

Lincoln, who enjoyed less than one year of formal schooling, was essentially self-educated. He read widely in nineteenth-century political economy, including the works of the British apostle of economic liberalism John Stuart Mill and the Americans Henry Carey and Francis Wayland. Although these writers differed on specific policies—Carey was among the most prominent advocates of a high tariff while Wayland favored free trade—all extolled the virtues of entrepreneurship and technological improvement in a modernizing market economy. (Wayland, the president of Brown University and a polymath who published works on ethics, religion, and philosophy, made no direct reference to slavery in his 400-page tome, Elements of Political Economy, but did insist that people did not work productively unless allowed to benefit from their own labor, an argument Lincoln would reiterate in the 1850s.)

Leibniz’s brilliant monadic system naturally gives rise to calculus (the main tool of mathematics and science). But it was not Leibniz who linked the energy of monads to waves – that was done later following the work of the French genius Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier on Fourier series and Fourier transforms. Nevertheless, Leibniz’s idea of energy originating from countless mathematical points and flowing across a plenum is indeed the first glimpse in the modern age of “field theory” that now underpins contemporary physics. Leibniz was centuries ahead of his time. Leibniz’s system is entirely mathematical. It brings mathematics to life. The infinite collection of monads constitutes an evolving cosmic organism, unfolding according to mathematical laws.

I brought Sev to the bedside, and together the little polymath and I counted: “All right, now we count legs: one—” “I don’t think that’s funny,” said Sev. “I know how to count.” “Well, then, what happened?” “I got the wrong chart.” “You didn’t look at this patient?” “Yes, I did,” said Sev. “I looked, I just didn’t see the other leg, that’s all. My cognitive set was for one leg, not for two.” “Terrific,” I said. “Reminds me of a very famous House LAW: SHOW ME A BMS WHO ONLY TRIPLES MY WORK AND I WILL KISS HIS FEET.

I write that I will learn a language and take up the piano. Margaret can teach me. This might help her get back to what she misses and loves to do. I write a promise that I will do extremely well at school, sleep well and write for the school newspaper. I will swim in the mornings before school to get fit and develop legs like Bridget’s. I will fulfil my enormous potential, learn a new word every day, read a novel every week and become the world’s most impressive autodidact and polymath. I will go the university and live in student digs.

When asked to work out the acreage of land in every English county, Halley “took a large map of England, and cut out the largest complete circle he could from the map.” That circle equated to 69.33 miles in diameter. He then weighed both the circle and the complete map, concluding that since the map weighed four times more than the circle, the area of England was four times the area of the circle. His result was only 1 percent off from contemporary calculations. Halley’s polymathic curiosity makes his list of accomplishments read like they’re out of a Jules Verne novel.

to peruse them all. Attempts to read every book, blog post, or article on a single topic are bound to result in failure. This brings us to step 6, which is learning how to filter our resources. In this step, our primary goal is to prune our collection of resources to preserve only the best and avoid being overwhelmed by all the materials we’ve collected.

Born on January 17, 1706, he inhabited this planet until April 17, 1790. His talents were many and he was known to be a polymath. Being a politician and a “Founding Father of the United States” was just one of what he was known for. An author, printer, inventor and freemason he is known to have invented the Franklin stove and bifocal eye glasses. He published the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Poor Richard’s Almanac. A founder of the University of Pennsylvania he also served as the first United States Ambassador to France and Governor of Pennsylvania. About 20,000 people attended his funeral. He was interred in Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia near the fence so that he could be close to where the ladies walked. His wit and sharp mind gave us many of his quotes!

Vul and Pashler drew inspiration from the well-known phenomenon known as the wisdom-of-crowds effect: averaging the independent judgments of different people generally improves accuracy. In 1907, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin and a famous polymath, asked 787 villagers at a country fair to estimate the weight of a prize ox. None of the villagers guessed the actual weight of the ox, which was 1,198 pounds, but the mean of their guesses was 1,200, just 2 pounds off, and the median (1,207) was also very close. The villagers were a “wise crowd” in the sense that although their individual estimates were quite noisy, they were unbiased. Galton’s demonstration surprised him: he had little respect for the judgment of ordinary people, and despite himself, he urged that his results were “more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.

Never give up on yourself Everyone may give up on you but never give up on yourself, because if you do, it will also become the end. Believe that anything can be achieved with effort. Most important of all, we must understand that dyslexia is not just a hindrance to learning; it may also be considered a gift. Multiple studies have proven that dyslexic people are highly creative and intuitive. Not to mention the long list of dyslexic people who have succeeded in their chosen fields; Known scientist and the inventor of telephone, Alexander Graham Bell; The inventor of telescope, Galileo Galilei; Painter and polymath, Leonardo da Vinci; Mathematician and writer Lewis Carroll; American journalist, Anderson Cooper; Famous actor, Tom Cruise; Director of our all time favorites Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg; Musician Paul Frappier; Entrepreneur and Apple founder, Steve Jobs; and maybe the person who is reading this book right now. We must always remember, everything can be learned and anyone can learn how to read!

Brunelleschi’s successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi’s experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate sons of prosperous fathers, athletic and good-looking, never-married, and fascinated by everything from math to art. One difference is that Alberti’s illegitimacy did not prevent him from being given a classical education. His father helped him get a dispensation from the Church laws barring illegitimate children from taking holy orders or holding ecclesiastical offices, and he studied law at Bologna, was ordained as a priest, and became a writer for the pope. During his early thirties, Alberti wrote his masterpiece analyzing painting and perspective, On Painting, the Italian edition of which was dedicated to Brunelleschi. Alberti had an engineer’s instinct for collaboration and, like Leonardo, was “a lover of friendship” and “open-hearted,” according to the scholar Anthony Grafton. He also honed the skills of courtiership. Interested in every art and technology, he would grill people from all walks of life, from cobblers to university scholars, to learn their secrets. In other words, he was much like Leonardo, except in one respect: Leonardo was not strongly motivated by the goal of furthering human knowledge by openly disseminating and publishing his findings; Alberti, on the other hand, was dedicated to sharing his work, gathering a community of intellectual colleagues who could build on each other’s discoveries, and promoting open discussion and publication as a way to advance the accumulation of learning. A maestro of collaborative practices, he believed, according to Grafton, in “discourse in the public sphere.” When Leonardo was a teenager in Florence, Alberti was in his sixties and spending much of his time in Rome, so it is unlikely they spent time together. Alberti was a major influence nonetheless.

This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal. The basic principle had been discovered much earlier. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), an Italian polymath, noticed its applicability to wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form. It also applies to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words), among many other things. Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.

A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area—so they had numerous patents in that area—but they were not as deep as the specialists. They also had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths’ breadth increased markedly as they learned about “the adjacent stuff,” while they actually lost a modicum of depth. They were the most likely to succeed in the company and to win the Carlton Award. At a company whose mission is to constantly push technological frontiers, world-leading technical specialization by itself was not the key ingredient to success.

For those who do not wish to blame this sordid history on science, and prefer to speak of pseudoscience, it will be good to consider that eugenics was a serious academic discipline at many universities. By 1930, institutes devoted to it existed in England, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, America, Germany, and Norway. Its theories were supported by prominent figures, including American presidents. Its founding father, the British anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton, became a fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted well after having espoused ideas about improving the human race. Notably, Galton felt that the average citizen was “too base for the everyday work of modern civilization.”11 It took Adolf Hitler and his henchmen to expose the moral bankruptcy of these ideas. The inevitable result was a precipitous drop of faith in science, especially biology. In the 1970s, biologists were still commonly equated with fascists, such as during the heated protest against “sociobiology.” As a biologist myself, I am glad those acrimonious days are over, but at the same time I wonder how anyone could forget this past and hail science as our moral savior. How

An inventor's depth and breadth were measured by their work history. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office categorizes technology into four hundred fifty different classes -- exercise, devices, electrical connectors, marine propulsion, and myriad more. Specialists tended to have their patents in a narrow range of classes. A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area -- so they had numerous patents in that area -- but they were not as deep as the specialists. They aslo had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths' breadth increased markedly as they learned about "the adjacent stuff," while they actually lost a modicum of depth.

Researchers say that when babies babble, they produce all the possible sounds of all human languages, randomly generating phonemes from Japanese to English to Swahili. As children learn the language of their parents, they narrow their sound repertoire to fit the model to which they are exposed. They begin to produce not just the sound of their native language but also its classical intonation patterns. Children lose their polymath talents so effectively that they ultimately become unable to produce some language sounds.

Lewis Carroll wrote fairytales and was a mathematician. Even today, engineers have revolutionized the film and music industries. Schools would be well served by nurturing polymaths.

Military expediency aside, how did the new emperor appear to his subjects? Experience, inclination and natural intelligence had made him a polymath, though the demands of his role as emperor, and the infinite resources available to him, left him open to accusations of dilettantism. This charge was unfair; he was unusual in that he genuinely wanted to become adept in many areas himself, rather than simply be served or amused by the ability of others. Throughout his reign his understanding was gained either by direct observation or by the development of skills that he admired in others. Poetry, architecture, music, philosophy and mathematics all intrigued him and he was patron of them all, surrounding himself with men of genius: the poet and satirist Juvenal, the architect Apollodorus, the historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Arrian, the writers Pliny the Younger, Pausanias and Plutarch.

Lastly, for journalists, the challenge ahead is to be polymaths, able to study and work with audiences, manage active databases, curate other content, and work closely with digital engineers and designers to make it all sing. They will need to be more entrepreneurial in their work arrangements, allowing the collective agreements that once ensured jobs for life to morph into new deals that reward journalists for their output as well as their input, and allow their news organizations to move staff more quickly when the market changes.

This polymath thinker is what IDEO’s Tim Brown has called a “T-Shaped Person.” T-shaped people have innate technical skills, along with empathy, curiosity, and great observational skills. “They have a principle skill that describes the vertical leg of the ‘T’—they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well.

I am an Omegan and a polymath. Whatever I set my mind to, I always achieve. The limitations that apply to the rest of humanity, Do not apply to me.

Ptolemy, the Graeco-Roman polymath (100 CE – 170 CE), mentions a third century BCE, port town Maisolos on the eastern coast of India in his accounts. This port has been identified with modern-day Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh. Later in the Erythraean Scrolls, it is mentioned as Masalia.

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), a celebrated polymath and an early advocate of the Copernican theory of the universe, on charges of holding erroneous opinions about various aspects of Catholic dogma, including the divinity of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the virginity of Mary. Bruno had offered only a halfhearted recantation rather than the abject confession that the Inquisition always demanded, and he was burned alive as an unrepentant heretic.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist he supported the idea of an American nation.[2] As a diplomat during the American Revolution he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the United States possible. Franklin is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values and character, a marriage of the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of Henry Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat."[3]

The word "scientist" was coined for a woman – the Scottish polymath Mary Somerville. When John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist, organised a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he had Somerville put her signature first on the petition

The word polymath, derived from the Greek words meaning “to know much” or “very knowing,” has come to mean in common parlance a person of encyclopedic learning. Polymaths are not to be confused with dilettantes, who take up new subjects for amusement or pleasure. Polymaths master their activities to a significant degree and perceive the fundamental connections between them. The greatest polymaths of all, like the “Renaissance men” Leonardo da Vinci, Vesalius, and Michelangelo, seem capable of encompassing all that is known. Of course, no one has ever had truly encyclopedic knowledge, and that is not what we are calling for here. But it has long been observed by psychologists that people who are innovative tend to participate in a wider range of activities and develop a higher degree of skill in those activities than other people. Certainly that has been the case for virtually every artist, scientist, inventor, and humanist discussed in these pages, nearly all of whom can be called polymaths.

With such a polymath as President, Jefferson’s White House had become a scientific nexus where botany, geography and exploration were the favourite dinner topics.

If you want time, bake it in from the start. If you want to live the sake of your goals now instead of forty years later in retirement, mix those values in now and watch your way of life rise as it bakes. Forty years later, you’ll have lived what could be considered multiple lives—a polymathic lifestyle. Mix your values into your daily living and find your voice, today.

This theoretical edifice is the singular intellectual creation of Giulio Tononi, a brilliant, sometimes cryptic, polyglot and polymath renaissance scholar, a scientist-physician of the first rank. Giulio is the living embodiment of the Magister Ludi of Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, the head of an austere order of monks-intellectuals, dedicated to teaching and playing the eponymous glass bead game, capable of generating a near infinity of patterns, a synthesis of all arts and sciences.

You’re lucky. I wish I were so smart.” Maybe then I could graduate early and help my parents that much sooner. “Except I can’t even decide on a major.” “Why not? She blinks. “It’s hard to explain. I’m . . .” She glances away and then back. “I’m a polymath.” “A what now?” “It’s a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning. Someone whose expertise spans a significant number of subject areas. The term itself is a derivative of poly, meaning many, and manthanein, a Greek verb meaning to learn.” I stare at her. “Reese, this is amazing.” She won’t meet my eyes. Instead, she picks up the pillow and holds it in her lap, fidgeting with the fabric at the corner. “You can literally do anything.” “But don’t you see?” Her eyes meet mine, flashing in frustration. “It’s impossible to pick only one thing. Our current global economy is hyperspecialized, while I’m a student of all things but a master of none. My parents are brilliant artists. Scarlett is a brilliant chef. I am more of a jack-of-all-trades. I can’t find any one specific thing I want to learn or excel at above all others.” “Huh. I still can’t see this as a disadvantage. You’re so smart that the sky is the limit.” “But the whole point of college and picking a career is to find that limit. Isn’t it?” “I don’t know.” I never thought about it that way. “I think it’s more than that. It’s about doing something you enjoy, something you feel passionate about.

Wales started with a few dozen prewritten articles and a software application called a Wiki (named for the Hawaiian word meaning “quick” or “fast”), which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what’s there. The ambition: Nothing less than to construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria. This was, needless to say, controversial. For one thing, this is not how encyclopedias are supposed to be made. From the beginning, compiling authoritative knowledge has been the job of scholars. It started with a few solo polymaths who dared to try the impossible. In ancient Greece, Aristotle single-handedly set out to record all the knowledge of his time. Four hundred years later, the Roman nobleman Pliny the Elder cranked out a thirty-seven-volume set of the day’s knowledge. The Chinese scholar Tu Yu wrote an encyclopedia on his own in the ninth century. And in the 1700s, Diderot and a few of his pals (including Voltaire and Rousseau) took twenty-nine years to create the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers.

There are other ways to gather resources too.

After Amazon, Google is our next database for finding resources

Searching for the term yields a massive list of resources with several tutorials on the subject.

Following my search on Google, I’ll peruse Facebook and Twitter to locate some individual historians

or organizations that could be helpful at some point. I might seek them out to ask for their advice on how to approach learning a topic, or to use them as a resource if I struggle during my attempts to study the subject.

differentiates my method from other forms of notetaking. It starts on the second line for each note, where you left space, and you summarize what you wrote in step one in a complete sentence. When you do this, it’s important not to just repeat the initial note, even if you took your notes in complete sentences.

differentiates my method from other forms of notetaking. It starts on the second line for each note, where you left space, and you summarize what you wrote in step one in a complete sentence. When you do this, it’s important not to just repeat the initial note, even if you took your notes in complete sentences. Using your own words, converting the note to language that helps you understand the meaning is essential. Ideally, you are able to extract a deeper level of understanding. Really seek to make connections and find relationships within the information.

This isn’t applicable to every piece of information, but do it anyway. Why? While it can seem redundant, the

repetition itself also helps to cement the knowledge in your mind. The emphasis on repeating the knowledge in your own words, and in a fully coherent, complete sentence, requires you to process the information and chew on its meaning, thus entrenching it more deeply in your mind.

Step three: In the third line, the final blank line you left for yourself, state any connections you can find between the subject of that note and the broader topic you’re studying. If you

notice that the content of your note has some sort of cause-and-effect relationship with the broader topic, write that here.

Find how the information contributes to an overall narrative or story. See it as a living and breathing factor instead of a dry factoid.