Let’s have some fun today. Let’s talk about an actual modern
polymath. Even though we have a way to go before we come to a good, solid
definition of polymath and polymathy, let’s have a working hypothesis that
Isaac Asimov, who I mentioned earlier, fits the bill. We’ll call it the Asimov
rule. Anyone who has written over five hundred books on dozens of
non-fiction topics and who was one of the greatest and most important science
fiction authors ever is a polymath.
Asimov was born in the USSR and emigrated with his family to
New York when he was three. He graduated from high school at age fifteen, received
his B.S. in chemistry at age nineteen, and his master’s in chemistry at age
twenty-one. World War II then called a halt to his graduate studies for several
years, and he did not obtain his Ph.D. in chemistry until 1948.
He then accepted a position at Boston University School of
Medicine to teach biochemistry, even though he had never studied biochemistry, not
that this stopped him from writing a textbook on biochemistry several years
later.
Meanwhile, during this time, Asimov had already become one
of the leading science fiction writers in the English speaking world. He made
his first sale of a short story in 1938 when he was only eighteen. He kept on
writing and began to sell his stories consistently. In 1940, he and
John W.Campbell, Jr., the editor of
Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, invented Asimov’s famous
Three Laws of Robotics,
three simple rules that robots were programmed with in his science fiction
universe. Asimov was renowned for these laws, which he used in many short
stories and novels.
But, in 1941, he published his most famous story, a
non-robotic story called “
Nightfall,” which vaulted him permanently into the
upper echelon of science fiction writers. “Nightfall” was set on a planet that
had a complex orbit around six suns and that only experienced darkness every
2,049 years. Because that planet’s civilization was unused to the dark, the
people would go insane every time the eclipse occurred and would have to
rebuild their civilization. “Nightfall” has generally been considered one of
the best, if not the best, science fiction short story of all time. In addition
to his robot stories, Asimov developed his equally famous
Foundation series through a separate set of short stories. The
Foundation stories were a future history
in which civilization was based on what Asimov called psychohistory, a type of mathematical
sociology that held that the behavior of a very large group of people (a galaxy
of people) is predictable. Asimov later turned these stories into a series of
novels during the 1950’s, and revisited the Foundation universe for four more
novels three decades later, in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Asimov did all of his early science fiction writing in his
spare time; he still had his day job as a biochemistry professor, which he enjoyed
only in part. He had rapidly grown into a phenomenal public speaker (which he
continued to be throughout his life), but hated doing research. He only wrote a
few scholarly papers, instead choosing to jump right into scientific
publishing.
His 1952 biochemistry textbook was his first non-science
fiction publication for sale. Hundreds more would follow over the decades, and
Asimov became the leading science writer in the English language (if not many
other languages, as many of his books were translated into multiple languages,
including Braille). Asimov started with chemistry and biochemistry textbooks
and then decided to leave Boston University in 1958 to write full time.
He stopped writing science fiction for a while in order to
devote himself full time to science writing, branching out into physics,
biology, mathematics, astronomy, earth sciences, and general science. He wrote
technical books and non-technical books. He wrote children’s science books. He
wrote layman’s guides to science and even a biographical encyclopedia of 1,500
of the world’s greatest scientists. Then he decided to tackle history,
religion, literature, and the arts. His non-scientific topics ranged from The Roman Republic, to Words in Genesis, to Asimov’s Chronology of the World, to Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, to Asimov’s Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan.
In total, Asimov wrote 38 science fiction novels, over 500 short stories, 24
books on general scientific topics, 7 books on mathematics, 68 books on
astronomy, 11 books on the earth sciences, 16 books on chemistry and
biochemistry, 22 books on physics, 17 books on biology, 19 books on history, 7
books on the Bible, 10 books on literature, 9 books of humor (including 4 books
of risqué limericks), 3 autobiographies, and 100 or so anthologies of science
fiction and other types of short stories. Then, just to fill in the time,
Asimov wrote over 1,600 essays for newspapers, magazines, journals, and other
writers’ books on topics from anthropology to zoology and almost every topic in
between, which he compiled into dozens of books of his collected essays.
Asimov’s 506 books (he may have written a couple more, depending on what source you consult) cover a
staggering portion of the Dewey Decimal universe. Based on the listing of
books in Edward Seiler's magnificent
Isaac Asimov Home Page, Asimov wrote books in 86 out of the 908 categories of the
Dewey Decimal System and 49 out of the 226 categories of the Library of
Congress classification. These records are unmatchable; it is fair to say that no
one else will ever come close.
Asimov wrote very little science fiction for almost two
decades, but returned with a bang in the 1980’s with new robot and Foundation novels, new short stories,
and novels unrelated to his previous worlds and universes.
Asimov must be considered a polymath because of the Asimov
rule: anyone who writes hundreds of
books on a dozen areas of the arts and the sciences and whose books are
classified under almost a quarter of the Library of Congress categories is a
polymath.
