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.