Isaac Asimov, a real polymath

Let’s have some fun today. Let’s talk about an actual modern polymath. Even though we have a way to go before we come to a good, solid definition of polymath and polymathy, let’s have a working hypothesis that Isaac Asimov, who I mentioned earlier, fits the bill. We’ll call it the Asimov rule. Anyone who has written over five hundred books on dozens of non-fiction topics and who was one of the greatest and most important science fiction authors ever is a polymath.

Asimov was born in the USSR and emigrated with his family to New York when he was three. He graduated from high school at age fifteen, received his B.S. in chemistry at age nineteen, and his master’s in chemistry at age twenty-one. World War II then called a halt to his graduate studies for several years, and he did not obtain his Ph.D. in chemistry until 1948.

He then accepted a position at Boston University School of Medicine to teach biochemistry, even though he had never studied biochemistry, not that this stopped him from writing a textbook on biochemistry several years later.

Meanwhile, during this time, Asimov had already become one of the leading science fiction writers in the English speaking world. He made his first sale of a short story in 1938 when he was only eighteen. He kept on writing and began to sell his stories consistently. In 1940, he and John W.Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, invented Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, three simple rules that robots were programmed with in his science fiction universe. Asimov was renowned for these laws, which he used in many short stories and novels.

But, in 1941, he published his most famous story, a non-robotic story called “Nightfall,” which vaulted him permanently into the upper echelon of science fiction writers. “Nightfall” was set on a planet that had a complex orbit around six suns and that only experienced darkness every 2,049 years. Because that planet’s civilization was unused to the dark, the people would go insane every time the eclipse occurred and would have to rebuild their civilization. “Nightfall” has generally been considered one of the best, if not the best, science fiction short story of all time. In addition to his robot stories, Asimov developed his equally famous Foundation series through a separate set of short stories. The Foundation stories were a future history in which civilization was based on what Asimov called psychohistory, a type of mathematical sociology that held that the behavior of a very large group of people (a galaxy of people) is predictable. Asimov later turned these stories into a series of novels during the 1950’s, and revisited the Foundation universe for four more novels three decades later, in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Asimov did all of his early science fiction writing in his spare time; he still had his day job as a biochemistry professor, which he enjoyed only in part. He had rapidly grown into a phenomenal public speaker (which he continued to be throughout his life), but hated doing research. He only wrote a few scholarly papers, instead choosing to jump right into scientific publishing.

His 1952 biochemistry textbook was his first non-science fiction publication for sale. Hundreds more would follow over the decades, and Asimov became the leading science writer in the English language (if not many other languages, as many of his books were translated into multiple languages, including Braille). Asimov started with chemistry and biochemistry textbooks and then decided to leave Boston University in 1958 to write full time.

He stopped writing science fiction for a while in order to devote himself full time to science writing, branching out into physics, biology, mathematics, astronomy, earth sciences, and general science. He wrote technical books and non-technical books. He wrote children’s science books. He wrote layman’s guides to science and even a biographical encyclopedia of 1,500 of the world’s greatest scientists. Then he decided to tackle history, religion, literature, and the arts. His non-scientific topics ranged from The Roman Republic, to Words in Genesis, to Asimov’s Chronology of the World, to Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, to Asimov’s Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan.

In total, Asimov wrote 38 science fiction novels, over 500 short stories, 24 books on general scientific topics, 7 books on mathematics, 68 books on astronomy, 11 books on the earth sciences, 16 books on chemistry and biochemistry, 22 books on physics, 17 books on biology, 19 books on history, 7 books on the Bible, 10 books on literature, 9 books of humor (including 4 books of risqué limericks), 3 autobiographies, and 100 or so anthologies of science fiction and other types of short stories. Then, just to fill in the time, Asimov wrote over 1,600 essays for newspapers, magazines, journals, and other writers’ books on topics from anthropology to zoology and almost every topic in between, which he compiled into dozens of books of his collected essays.

Asimov’s 506 books (he may have written a couple more, depending on what source you consult) cover a staggering portion of the Dewey Decimal universe. Based on the listing of books in Edward Seiler's magnificent Isaac Asimov Home Page, Asimov wrote books in 86 out of the 908 categories of the Dewey Decimal System and 49 out of the 226 categories of the Library of Congress classification. These records are unmatchable; it is fair to say that no one else will ever come close.

Asimov wrote very little science fiction for almost two decades, but returned with a bang in the 1980’s with new robot and Foundation novels, new short stories, and novels unrelated to his previous worlds and universes.

Asimov must be considered a polymath because of the Asimov rule: anyone who writes  hundreds of books on a dozen areas of the arts and the sciences and whose books are classified under almost a quarter of the Library of Congress categories is a polymath.