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!
Does this hold also for a master engineer? This person must be proficient in electricity, structures, energy, economics, legislations and regulations, and many other areas.
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