Let's start looking at another polymath. What about Emil Votoček?
Votoček was an organic chemist and chemistry professor who, in his later years, fulfilled his dream of composing music so well that he received his own listing not only in a Czech biographical dictionary of composers and musicians, but also in the leading biographical dictionary of music for the English speaking world, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
It's been a while, so I forget precisely how I learned about him, but I do have this article in my files with the amazing title of The Lesser Known Chemist-Composers, Past And Present. And here is a link to that article.
It turns out that there are a fair number of reasonably well-known chemist-composers. Probably the leading chemist-composer is the Russian Alexander Borodin, who also appears on my list of polymaths. I'll get to him some day. But you've also probably heard of Edward Elgar.
I wonder if there are also well-known biologist-composers. Or maybe physicist-composers. Sounds like a promising avenue for further research.
More tomorrow.
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