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.