the non-polymath as barbarian?

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Chapter 13

The economist as polymath

You may remember that I posted a week or ago a kind of crazy quote from the Greek writer Lucian, who wrote that even that a pantomime must be polymathic, which, to Lucian, meant that a pantomime needed to have knowledge of culture; music, rhythm, and meter; natural and moral philosophy; rhetoric; painting and sculpting; and ancient myths and history.

Well, that wasn't just an old way of thinking. It turns out that some great thinkers thought that way even into the twentieth century.

The famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that the "master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard."

The master economist must thus be a polymath!

Why polymathy? Because polymaths make connections that others don't.

The 18th century author of the first modern encyclopedia, Ephraim Chambers, thought that polymathy itself “sought the connections between 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.

Rutherford Aris, pt. 4

We have talked about Rutherford Aris's chemical engineering and paleography careers, but Aris was more than just a chemical engineer and a paleographer. He put the arts and sciences together and was truly an interdisciplinary thinker. He believed that engineers were aided by thinking interdisciplinarily, as he did. He started a series of seminars in the Minnesota engineering department that addressed the arts and the sciences.

 

He wrote a number of essays on the interaction of the arts and the sciences and on the interplay between his specialties of mathematical modeling and paleography (and on the interplay between mathematical modeling and poetry!). But his interests ranged far more widely than even his widely disparate specialties.

He had a poem on literary criticism published in the journal New Literary History. He co-wrote an article in a technology journal on Anglo-Saxon military theory. He even wrote an essay in the form of a conversation between a mathematician, an engineer, and a paleographer (his three interests) on the importance of approaching mathematical modeling from multiple points of view.

And h was also famous for a prank that he pulled on Who’s Who in 1974. His biography was already in Who’s Who, but, in the early 1970’s, Who’s Who began sending him a biographical data sheet to fill out in the name of Aris Rutherford. He wrote back, telling them that there was no such person, but his protests did not register. Who’s Who continued to request a bio from Aris Rutherford, and finally Aris sent one.

Aris Rutherford made it into the 1974-75 edition of Who’s Who. Aris Rutherford was a Scottish prodigy and a serious tippler. He obtained his degree at the age of 18 from the Strath Spey and Glenlivet Institute of Distillation Engineering, and subsequently had such positions as the chief design engineer and tester for the Strath Spey Distillation Company and visiting professor of distillation practice at the Technological Institute of the Aegean. He wrote three books, including American Football: A Guide for Interested Scots. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the hoax was shortly exposed, and Aris Rutherford lasted only one year in Who's Who.

For his renown in fields as far removed as chemical engineering and paleography, Rutherford Aris makes our list. He was a proselytizing polymath who was devoted to the connection between the arts and the sciences, scattering classical references throughout his engineering papers.

Rutherford Aris, pt. 3

While Aris was a noted chemical engineer, remember that it was one of his side projects, paleography, that developed into full blown expertise and elevated him to polymath status.

He developed his interest in ancient scripts, the shapes of letters, and calligraphy when he was on sabbatical at Cambridge University in 1964. At Cambridge, he attended the paleography lectures of one of the leaders in the field, Cambridge professor T.A.M. Bishop, and was bitten with the letter bug.

He ultimately became a leading scholar in the field, and was appointed a professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Near Eastern and Classical Studies, where he became most well known for his two books on ancient scripts, an index to a book on first millennium Latin scripts (An Index of Scripts in E.A. Lowe's 'Codices Latini Antiquores,' Pts. I-XI and Supplement) and a history of Latin scripts from the first through the fifteenth centuries (Explicatio Formarum Litterarum (The Unfolding of Letterforms from the First Century to the Fifteenth)).

Rutherford Aris, pt. 2

Rutherford Aris remained at the University of Minnesota until his death in 2005, and became a giant in the field of chemical engineering. He wrote thirteen books and over three hundred articles in the field, mentored dozens of graduate students, and held visiting professorships at a number of other universities, including the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

See here for a comprehensive bibliography of Aris’s work.

Aris was a leader in the mathematical modeling of chemical processes. He studied why chemical reactions might spin out of control and how engineers could better control them. But his work was not just theoretical; it greatly helped the chemical industry improve its safety and efficiency. His research and scholarship contributed to the University of Minnesota being considered the leading chemical engineering graduate program in the United States.

Rutherford Aris, the chemical engineering polymath

Let’s get back to talking about the real polymaths. Here’s an extremely unusual polymath: Rutherford Aris, a British-American chemical engineer who also was one of the world’s most renowned experts in paleography, the study of handwriting.

Aris was an intellectual prodigy, completing the requirements for a mathematics degree with the highest honors, with a physics minor, from the University of London at the age of sixteen. However, he never actually attended college; he did all of his studies by correspondence. But he was refused his degree at that time because he was felt to be too young. So he took a job as a laboratory assistant with a chemical company until the university saw fit to award him his degree in 1948, when he was nineteen. He spent the next ten years alternating between post-graduate work, teaching mathematics, and working for the chemical company.

In 1958, the University of Minnesota, where he had done some post-graduate research, hired him as a chemical engineering professor, even though he had no Ph.D. He remedied that deficiency by once again taking a correspondence class at the University of London, this time for a doctorate in mathematics and chemical engineering. He wrote his thesis, “The Optimal Design of Chemical Reactors” (which was later translated into Japanese, Russian, and Czech, if not other languages) in six weeks, and obtained his degree in 1960.