Matthew Parris, the host of the BBC Radio 4 show Great Lives, addressed the difficulty in
defining the polymath in his introduction to a show in 2010 about the purported polymath
Buckminster Fuller.
He said, “There are people whose great glory and whose
besetting defect is that you can’t sum them up. They were too many things. They
did too much. They refused to be confined within one discipline. Such men and
women trail across their contemporaries’ skies like comets, dazzling their era.
Their obituaries gasp at how they straddled art, science, dog breeding, music,
cross country skiing, or whatever, are extraordinary. But to be good at
something else too can be fatal.”
These are indeed some of the problems that we will face in
getting to a definition of the real polymath.
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