The term renaissance man embodies an ideal born from a specific set of philosophical thoughts with their roots in the 14th century but coming more to fruition during the mid to late renaissance of the 16th and 17th centuries. The ideal is based on the concept that human knowledge is – at least in practical terms – limitless and that it is inherently valuable to embrace all knowledge and skills as fully as possible.
As this developed, the more nuanced modern concept of the polymath evolved. A polymath embraces the renaissance humanistic ideal regarding knowledge, but places upon it the notion that knowledge and skills both can and should cross interdisciplinary lines and that this crossing is one of the most powerful tools for innovation and extension of a field at our disposal.
From the early 20th century, specialisation has become common. The argument is that fields are advancing to the point that no individual is able to truly become an expert in more than one. If someone has spent ten years studying to become a doctor and then goes on to practice medicine and further hone their skills throughout their career, the argument for specialisation is that the majority of available time and energy is devoted to this and other knowledge is likely to not progress much beyond a hobby level. In some cases, there are those who reject the idea of a single specialisation but still follow the basic principle and will have two or maybe even three specialisations through a long and dedicated process of detailed study.
A modern polymath rejects this process as short sighted and ultimately wasted energy. Instead, the polymath approaches it differently. The fundamental flaw in specialisation is a lack of the realisation that the universe is inherently ordered and rule based (even the strange world quantum mechanics has rules; they’re just rules that have probabilities rather than certainties as outcomes). This means that the specialist concentrates only on the abstraction of their field rather than the underlying reality that would allow them to tie it to other knowledge more easily. The specialist in fact takes a completely reversed approach from the truth by viewing their field as reality and the underlying reality as an abstraction!
Often accused of being a “jack of all trades, master of none”, the polymath rejects this label – not because they believe they are ‘masters’ of many ‘trades’, but rather that the terminology is wrong. A “jack of all trades” is someone who has studied each trade as an individual and discrete thing, where the polymath sees them as all being aspects of the larger and more complex reality.
In 1960, the Hungarian physicist, engineer, and mathematician Eugene Wigner penned a paper titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. This paper describes the astounding fact that mathematics fits the world in ways that make no sense to the natural intuition. When measuring statistics of natural and common things such as population, car ownership, or the relationship between people who like barbecued food and rocket science, it’s quite normal that a social scientist will at some point quite early in the process turn to Gaussian distributions. In doing so, they’ll utilise the number π (pi) in drawing probability densities. π is a number that describes the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is completely unintuitive and ‘strange’ that the relationship between a circle’s circumference and diameter should have any meaning when talking about population statistics, but there it is.
This paper has inspired many people – myself included – to investigate the field of mathematics more deeply and in some cases even serve as the basis for the development of a personal philosophy following polymath ideals (whether or not the person has ever even heard the term).
However, it must also be noted clearly that it is a mistake to only focus on the mathematical relationships between entities and actions in the universe. The study of physics informs us that mathematics is not only the language of the universe we live in but in fact the language of all possible universes, even those that we do not inhabit or exist in nothing but theory and speculation. But mathematics applied in this way is a very low level descriptor. As Randall Munroe of xkcd fame points out in xkcd comic #435 “Purity”: sociology is just applied psychology, which is just applied biology, which is just applied chemistry, which is just applied physics, which is just applied mathematics. But trying to use the language of mathematics to describe the physics of the chemistry of the biology of the psychology of a particular piece of sociology would be maddening and not particularly useful.
Here, the polymath recognises another aspect of the universe that human brains are especially well adapted for: the fact that patterns tend to repeat throughout nature due to the underlying sameness and that using these patterns as the abstraction level instead of the field to which they are applied, higher order objects and actions can not only be understood and modelled effectively but that new patterns learned in one field can be applied and understood intuitively in others. These patterns may also be described mathematically, but it is a fundamentally different level of description to that used when describing the physical universe (although again, some patterns are repeated even at those vast differences of scale, which is a fact both beautiful and exciting itself).
Should this all sound a little abstract, allow me to give a concrete example. Many early advances in the understanding of neuronal communication – that is, the way that electrical impulses in a neuron cause follow-on electrical impulses in another (either directly or via chemical messaging) – were made not through direct observation or modelling of the system, but instead by examining social communication controlling the collective movement of flocks of birds, colonies of ants, and swarms of bees. The ‘activation’ and ‘inhibition’ of certain large scale actions in all members of the group can be followed back to the actions of a single individual and the complex interplay of interactions of other members as they react both to this initial action and the other reactions of the members around them. Birds, ants, and bees number in the tens or hundreds. Neurons number in the tens of billions. But fundamentally, the same patterns of interaction can be seen in both.
This may leave you wondering what makes someone a polymath. Do they have to be a genius to intuitively see these patterns? No. Not at all. For most people, becoming a polymath isn’t something that happens naturally but is in fact a choice. It has very little to do with natural intelligence. While it’s true that most polymaths who are famous for great works they have done are geniuses, it’s equally true that most people who are not polymaths who are famous for great works they have done are also geniuses. They’re famous not for whether or not they’re polymaths, but for whether or not they’re geniuses who have produced great works. Just as the vast majority of non-polymaths are never famous for anything, the vast majority of polymaths are equally unknown.
If you wish to become a polymath, it’s simply a matter of choosing to do so and then adopting the right mind set. One of the best ways to begin adopting such a mindset is to identify other writings where cross-disciplinary thought is employed. This could be anything from the personal notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci through to the self-improvement and business writings of Srinivas Rao. Once you’ve identified them, read them not with the idea to learn the subjects that they’re discussing, but instead to learn the author’s thought processes that let them tie together the seemingly unrelated topics. You should quickly find yourself seeing the relationship that you previously missed and have taken your first step towards being a polymath yourself.
Thoughts on anything and everything 