one more interesting definition of the polymath

The late president of Illinois Wesleyan University, Minor Myers, Jr., who had been working on a book on polymaths before his death, wrote that the polymath is “someone who achieves or approaches expertise or creativity in two or more separate fields.” Myers believed that a polymath is a genuinely interdisciplinary person who “lives in two or more boxes.”

With this, I think that we've the end of the best potential definitions of polymathy.

I will next offer my own definition of the modern polymath, and then start comparing it to the Renaissance Man.

Then the fun part begins. We can start looking at real polymaths.

polymathy in the Victorian era

We've kind of skipped around the centuries in trying to come up with a definition of polymathy, and we certainly skipped over the nineteenth century. Professor Silvan Schweber wrote an article titled "Scientists As Intellectuals: The Early Victorians," in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, in which he touched on this idea. He wrote, "What is striking about the early Victorian intellectual elite is their cultivation of polymathy, their insistence on mastering all that was known and could be known. The minimal standard of an educated man was considered by Augustus De Morgan [a pretty multi-talented guy himself] to be represented by 'a man who knows something of everything and everything of something.'"

And another musical interlude

Poly-Math, "Knight, Death & The Devil Pt.1," Live at Old Mill Studios

more on the value of polymathy

The 18^th century author of the first modern encyclopedia, Ephraim Chambers, thought that polymathy itself looked for the connections between otherwise unrelated subjects, writing, “Where numbers of things are thrown precariously together, we sometimes discover relations among them, which we should never have thought of looking for.” That is the essence of the value of polymathy. The polymath can make these connections and discover the relationships between completely different ideas and concepts not by reading about them, but because they are thrown precariously together in his or her mind.

the benefits of polymathy

Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, explained the benefits of polymathy very simply. He said, "It may well be a mistake to do just one thing,. If you practice multiple things you actually get better at any one of those things."

He analogized learning different things to working out. "It's sort of like walking on the beach. Every time you do it, you change the sand. But unless you keep stepping on the same piece of sand, you won't leave a permanent mark."

Is the polymath an interesting person?

Yesterday, I asked the question, “Is the polymath a more interesting person?”

I don’t think that there’s any empirical evidence on this subject (I haven’t found any), but the unscientific way of thinking about it to ask yourself this question, "Would you like to hang out with a polymath?"

And the unscientific answer is, apparently, yes, the average person would like to know a polymath. Or at least the average person thinks that the other average people would like to know a polymath. Have you ever counted the number of polymaths (and Renaissance men and women) (yes, I know, we still have to define the Renaissance person) in personal ads, wedding announcements, blogs, and obituaries?

Believe me, there are a lot of them.

Writer Thomas McCarthy noted, perhaps a bit sarcastically, that those whose marriages are reported in the Sunday New York Times are set apart from the rest of us by “their dazzling polymathy.”  One groom “plays the trumpet, does magic tricks...follows the art world closely...he sings, he dances, he's a computer whiz.”

In 1994, a review of a biography of the late pharmacy professor William Procter, Jr., in the scholarly Journal of American History gushed, “If not a polymath, Procter was at least a Renaissance man in the field of pharmacy.”

And these are just two references picked at random.

Look for yourself. There’s a lot out there.

Does being a polymath really make you more interesting? I don’t know, but it certainly seems like people think so. As we come to a definition of polymath and start looking at actual polymaths, maybe we’ll start thinking about whether they are actually good and interesting people, as opposed to just smart and talented people.