Having a clear vision of the whole is challenging, especially with the exceedingly vast amount of information now available. After all, we each take in some 100,000 words of information daily. The challenge is to be able to select that which may be of value to each of us and place things in the context of our lives specifically and the world at large in a way that matters to us. It is what Edward de Bono refers to as 'thinking to create value'. In this way, we all, to some extent, ought to become polymaths, for whom our entire world is our core field, and every aspect of existence that matters to it ought to be explored and used to understand it in its entirety. 

'We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom', says E.0. Wilson, one of today's leading philosophers of science. 'The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. Peter Burke, the world's foremost expert on the evolution of polymathy in Europe, concludes the same:

In an age of specialisation, generalists are needed more than ever before - not only for synthesis, to paint the bigger picture, but also for analysis, since it takes a polymath to 'mind the gap' and draw attention to the knowledges that may otherwise disappear into the spaces between disciplines, as they are currently defined and organised.

French philosopher Edgar Morin, father of the Complexity Theory, said:

We need a kind of thinking that reconnects that which is disjointed and compartmentalized, that which respects diversity as it recognizes unity, and that tries to discern interdependencies. We need a radical thinking (which gets to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and an organizational or systems thinking.

 Schools and universities have traditionally been centres for the dissemination of knowledge - its transfer, that is, via lectures and books from the teacher to the student. But today, in the 'information age' information availability is no longer the problem; information navigation is the challenge of our times. 'Because everyone has access to this tsunami of information it becomes really critical that we teach people how to navigate it', highlights Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. 'How do we know what to trust? A lot of people have not been taught these skills'. Navigation requires thought, and as Edward de Bono points out. our current educational institutions do not fulfil the important role of teaching the indispensable skill of thinking. It is through thinking - the process that involves deduction, synthesis and application - that information becomes knowledge.

Censorship today is not withholding information, but flooding you with information in a disjointed, random fashion. This either overwhelms and confuses us, or forces us to give up on understanding the whole, and focus on a specific. It can easily reinforce the closed-minded, narrow specialisation that our society already suffers from. We've always been in pursuit of a global, universal Library since Babylon, Alexandria and so on', says psychologist Rand Spiro who focuses on multimedia education, 'now we have it in the form of the internet, but unfortunately people are using it in a closed way to spare themselves the trouble of thinking ... when in fact the web is very good at being able to find alternative views'.

While this certainly encourages a culture of relative complacency, laziness and deprivation of human thinking (there is plenty of research to suggest this), its benefits can be infinitely greater if each individual is able to intelligently utilise it. 'In the modern information age, one would think the chance to obtain information more quickly would call forth polymathy', says Hamlet Isakhanli, '(it] creates great opportunities for anyone who wants to learn many things'. Indeed a burgeoning 'ideas industry' that includes conferences, web portals and podcasts that host a range of speakers from different fields (such as Idea City, Lift, Big Think, RSA, Intelligence Squared, Jo Rogan Experience, Tim Ferriss, London Real) play an important role in encouraging the expansion of mind and development of the self.

Whether theoretical or experiential, information is readily available at our fingertips. One can learn almost anything: car mechanics, Polynesian philosophy, emergency survival, the history of Russian art, software troubleshooting, mobile phone engineering, Marxist economics, applied pharmacology, household plumbing. It is easy to 'Wikihow' or simply 'Google' almost anything. Web-based information, if sourced wisely, can allow for anyone to polymathise. Online sources such as YouTube (all sorts of videos imaginable), Khan Academy (tutorials on a range of subjects), TED (new ideas on a range of matters), the Edge (ideas from the West's scientific elite), Wikipedia (which has 31 million articles in 267 different languages), not to mention the 5 million e-books available for free and every single newspaper and magazine being available online floods us with a tsunami

of information. Yet educational institutions have not progressed from their centuries: Old role relating to the collation and distribution (transfer) of knowledge in order to teach how best to organise, understand and use it. Critical thinking is needed equally, if not more, today than in the past in order to discern what information is needed, when, to what extent and in what context.

Revolution

According to the most commonly held narrative on human evolution, from two million to 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species: Homo neandethalensis, Homo erectus, Homo soloensis, Homo floresiensis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster and Homo sapiens. A cognitive revolution is what allowed sapiens to survive extinction vis-à-vis the other Homo genus. A large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are what ensured the sustainability of the sapien. 

This was the first cognitive revolution; the second has not yet taken place. There have of course been cultural and intellectual renaissances, such as in eleventh-century Cordoba, thirteenth-century Timbuktu, fifteenth- century Florence and eighteenth-century Paris (among many, many others). There have been technological breakthroughs and spiritual awakenings, as well as scientific, political and economic revolutions at different points over the last few millennia. But a cognitive revolution - one that alters the neurological structure of the brain to bring about a change in consciousness of an entire species - is yet to come. And it must come this century. Few would argue with the assessment that humankind is suffering from an existential crisis, which requires imminent resolution. And it is this age old breed of human, the polymath, who will once again have to rise to the challenge.

Hope you're looking forward to it as much as we are!

In the stylish yet frantic environs of the Canary Wharf building in London, I bumped into Zack, a contemporary from my high school over a decade earlier. He was on the descending escalator, impeccably dressed, his shoulders slumped, eyes drooping with exhaustion, one hand held by his trouser pocket and the other half-clenching his backpack. As soon as I recognised him from the floor below, I decided to remain at the foot of his escalator intending to surprise him. I had time for a flashback.

Every school has a Zack or two. The type that shines in every subject of the curriculum, produces mind-blowing artwork, plays various musical instruments with ease, takes the lead roles in the school plays and captains more than one of the sports teams. Zack was the archetypical school-boy all-rounder everyone had high hopes for. Less than a decade on, back at the bottom of the escalator in the City, Zack tells me of his life since schoolboy stardom.

He had read economics at a good university, followed by a master's degree in accounting and finance, after which he completed a professional financial qualification and joined an investment bank in the City to become a derivatives researcher focusing on the luxury goods market. It wasn't quite clear whether he was embarrassed or proud of working sixteen hour days. It all seemed rather impressive; but one thing struck me from our conversation. Zack had compromised all of his numerous other talents and interests - sport, art, music, science, drama, literature, languages, academia and current affairs - to micro-focus on something that was clearly far from his lifelong passion or dream. This compromise was inadvertent. Indeed, derivative researching was in all probability a bigger earner than your average job; but somehow I doubted that to be the sole reason. After congratulating him on his apparent success, I wandered home thinking about why things had turned out the way they had for Zack.

It soon became crystal clear. Zack's story was not uncommon; it was in fact the norm. Our Western system - together with the majority of the world that seems bent on imitating it - imperceptibly forces us to 'specialise' as we get older. For example Britain: 10 GCSEs, four A Levels, one bachelor's degree, a more specialised masters degree, an even more specialised job, within which everyone is further encouraged to find and nurture their own speciality-so much so that any additional pursuits enhance the risk of compromising this speciality. That is one route; the other is more merciless. Leave school with limited or no qualifications, find a 'trade', find a job related to it, achieve a competence at it and thereafter rely on it for survival and stability through-out life. However steep, it seems our lives assume the shape of pyramids. Sitting atop this pyramid, we are often secure but rarely fulfilled.

Sadly, we are living under a perilous illusion. We have been programmed to assume that lifelong, exclusive dedication to one fragmented aspect of life is the only way to pursue truth, identity or even a livelihood. This is a myth, if there ever was one. We fail to understand that this one aspect of the world has been broken, or torn, from its family and packaged up as a world of its own, with clear and stringent boundaries. If this field' is not forced upon us (as it is for most people around the world) then the neces- sity to choose one, inhabit it and close ourselves within its confines as soon as possible certainly is. Who forces us? Parents, educational institutions, employers, governments or even society itself, which has evolved to per- petuate fragmentation and hyper-specialisation in all areas of life. Like the 'invisible hand', it has become a force of its own, promoted and sustained by those whom it serves most. In this sense, hyper-specialisation has become an ideology, and likewise propagated to the masses as the 'obvious way things are done'. To emancipate ourselves from this outdated mode of being and thinking, it is important to first be conscious of how and why we ever became such a hyper-specialised society in the first place.

MODERN EDUCATION CRISIS 

The current education system is clearly not working, at least according to esteemed British educationalist Ken Robinson. This is because it is grossly outdated; it is still based on a model that Victorian Britain installed, which fostered a culture of linearity, conformity and standardization', whereas today we are faced with a different world, one that is 'organic, adaptable and diverse'. This incongruence affects the students' intellectual and professional prospects. So treating children like robots doesn't even suit the twenty-first-century job market. Anders Sandberg of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute says, 'Educational institutions don't need to train people to be cogs in a machine like during the industrial age - machines will be much cheaper . . . they ought to train people to deal with more complex, ill-defined jobs'.

This supply-demand mismatch in the education system explains why the thirst for real knowledge and understanding is left unquenched at school and students thus feel an urge later in life as adults to revisit the basics by reading elementary-level popular history or popular science books on their commute to an (already unfulfilling) job - indeed this explains the recent rise in the popularity of such books among the so-called 'educated class'. But adults ought to have been educated (or 'entertained', even) by these popular books as children rather than sleepwalking through their childhood and then suddenly as adults awaking from a somnolent state to the fact that there are fascinating and important aspects to life beyond their practical and professional toil. Most do not even wake up. Research at Bristol University by educational psychologists Shafi and Rose showed that many mature students did not feel that their initial education instilled any excitement or even understanding of education; they had to wait to experience "life' before realising the value of education and consequently returning to it later in life.

This clear disconnect between the student and the modern education system is a result of what Whitehead referred to as 'inert ideas' compartmentalised, fragmented information thrown at students at school without any unifying framework. As a result, students are not only less able to make sense of how these fragments of knowledge transmitted to them in various classes are relevant to each other, but more importantly, how they are relevant to their own lives. There is simply no context and there- fore no internalisation. This predicament continues to this day. Children are sitting in classrooms, listening to lectures and reading books wondering what relevance geometry or medieval history or plate tectonics has for them. Is it going to help them get a 'respectable' job as a corporate executive or government clerk? Or is it simply a torturous initiation ceremony that one must undergo before coming of age?

This disjointed education, based as it is on the model of a factory, is then exacerbated by a process of pyramid specialisation as they move through the system. Students worldwide are being encouraged, often forced, to specialise too early. As a result, multitalented children are often being faced with what psychologists refer to as 'multipotentiality' - a condition of frustration, confusion and anxiety suffered by multitalented pupilsas a result of the compulsion to specialise (that is, choose between multiple passions) too early. Many child prodigies with an exceptional general intelligence are rapidly encouraged (almost forced) to channel their intellectual capacities exclusively into one specific field. Parents and teachers convince themselves this is completely natural. Consequently, polymathic prodigies (or 'multipotentialites') often face the same fate as child prodigies in general - they seldom fulfil their potential and often fall short of expectations as adults. It is also a major cause of child depression. Cognitive scientist, educationalist and developer of the Cognitive Flexibility Theory, Rand Spiro, confirms that schools are complicit in suppressing a child's polymathic nature:

Kids are very cognitively flexible; it is school with its multiple choice tasks, regimental learning, and compartmentalization of subjects that has scorched that flexibility, that creativity, that inherent ability to see the world outside of single disciplinary boundaries . . . see it polymathically.

It is no wonder that these children, ill equipped to make vocational choices, get swept up by a system that treats humans as mere cogs in the corporate machine.

"The greatest scientists are artists as well." - Albert Einstein

Perhaps the best demonstration of the importance of interdisciplinarity is the largely unappreciated connection between art and science. Indeed, science is often used as a vehicle to excel in art, and vice versa. The creativity resulting from the art-science intersection has been evident throughout history. Leonardo used mathematics to achieve geometrical perfection in his paintings such as The Last Supper, whereas Einstein used his music (he played the violin) to spur his imagination while developing his General Theory of Relativity. Both made special note of the importance of these 'external' influences on their work. The supposed conceptual difference between the two is that 'artists' work with possible worlds whereas "scientists' are constrained to working in the real' world. In truth, we know that imagination has a value for reality and reality has a value for imagination.

 The reason that this strong connection worked for geniuses such as Einstein and Leonardo is that science and art fills gaps for one another and serve as springboards into each other's worlds. indeed the most pioneering and creative scientists such as Einstein agreed that imagination is  more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand'

According to a study by American psychologist Bernice Eiduson titled the 'Sigma Xi Survey based on testimonials by numerous Nobel laureates, most great scientists often have multiple avocational interests. In-depth analysis of Nobel laureates in literature between 1901 and 2002 found that great artists and writers often have multiple avocational interests. He found that the science laureates were highly accomplished outside the lab: more than half had at least one artistic avocation, and almost all had an enduring hobby, from chess to insect collecting; one quarter were musicians; and 18% practiced visual arts such as drawing or painting. These laureates are 25 times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance or act; 17 times as likely to be a visual artist; 12 times more likely to write poetry and literature; 8 times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; 4 times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer.

There are many examples. Anatomist Ronald Ross was also a notable novelist, playwright, poet and painter; physicist Murray Gell-Mann is also an authority on the history of languages, the psychology of creative thinking, ornithology and archaeology. This implies that artistic avocation can have an effect on general intelligence. In fact, so-called specialists like Einstein, have gone as far as suggesting that their other interests actually play an Important role in contributing to and enhancing their work in their primary field. "I often think in music . . " he is recorded saying.

Many scientific polymaths have used art to contribute toward their understanding of various branches of science. Ismail al Jazari, the prolific twelfth-century inventor and engineer, produced beautiful miniatures of his designs, using art as a tool of both investigation and presentation in his famous notebooks which some say inspired Leonardo da Vinci. The eighteenth-century English scientist Erasmus Darwin, a physician, botanist, biologist, cosmologist and engineer, famously used poetry to articulate his ponderings on nature. Bengali scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose excelled as a biologist, physicist and botanist and then used storytelling as a means for scientific exploration, and in doing so became one of the fathers of modern science fiction. Austrian scientist Ernst Haeckel, a physician, zoologist, biologist and philosopher of science, expressed his appreciation of nature through a series of beautiful paintings and drawings. Similarly, Afro-American George Washington Carver - referred to by TIME magazine in 1941 as 'the Black Leonardo' for his numerous agricultural inventions including plastics, paints, dyes and gasoline - enhanced his understanding of botany through his earlier career as a plant painter. Spanish neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Caial is equally known for his breathtaking drawings of neurons. American Samuel Morse was an inventor and painter in equal measure. The list goes on.

Likewise, many artists have used scientific concepts to produce artistic masterpieces. Jazz musician John Coltrane's mathematical 'Tone Circle' model is a fine example. Salvador Dali used his intricate knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian atomic physics to produce exceptional paintings such as The Great Masturbator and Galatea of the Spheres. Desmond Morris, another important figure in modern surrealist painting, used his expertise in zoology to inform his highly acclaimed artwork. 'If my paintings do nothing else, they will serve to demonstrate that such titles ("science" and "art") are misleading', he says. 'Painting is not merely a craft, it is a form of personal research . . . In reality people today are not scientists or artists . . . they are explorers or non-explorers, and the context of their explorations are of secondary importance’. 

 Art historian Kenneth Clarke noted that both art and science essentially emerge from the same imaginative sources: 'Art and science ... are not as used to be supposed, two contrary activities, but in fact draw on many of the same capacities of the human mind. In the last resort, each depends on the imagination. Artist and scientist alike are both trying to give concrete form to dimly apprehended ideas. This is confirmed by a recent psychological study, which concludes: 'scientists and artists often describe their creative work habits in the same ways, using the same language, and draw on common, transdisciplinary mental toolkits that include observing, imaging, abstracting, patterning, body thinking, empathizing and so forth'.

The need to bring art and science back together since the disciplinary and professional compartmentalisation of the industrial revolution was, as mentioned before, highlighted famously by scientist-novelist CP Snow in his 1959 'The Two Cultures' lectures, which warned against unhealthy divergence of art (including the humanities) and science. In 1990, artist- inventor-psychologist Todd Siler coined the term 'ArtScience' in recognition of the interconnections between the two worlds, although the term nor the concept never fully took off. More recently, Eric Schimdt, CEO of Google, one of the world's most creative and influential organisations, asserted that this connection must be reignited in order to foster technological innovation in the modern world. We need to bring art and science back together', he said in a recent speech to British technologists. 'Think back to the glory days of the Victorian era. It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges".

“One part of learning doth confer light onto another” — Isaac Barrow 

Success has far too often come as a result of borrowing ideas from one field in order to advance in another. This is as true for art or science as it is for scholarship or practical endeavours. Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin are undisputed geniuses, yet we have now discovered that they were not the tunnel-visioned specialists we too often assume them to be. On the contrary, the facts (and their own admissions) suggest that it was the connections made with their hobbies, varied backgrounds and additional pursuits that enabled them to make the breakthroughs they did in their respective core disciplines. Louis Pasteur's groundbreaking discovery of the microbe was only possible because Pasteur also had a background in crystallography, allowing him to appreciate the need for a microscopic lens in order to see the microbe. 'Polymaths master their activities to a significant degree and perceive the fundamental connections between them', notes psychologist Robert Root-Bernstein.

Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Celebrated nineteenth-century English scientist William Rowan Hamilton was a physicist, astronomer and mathematician who used the interconnectedness of his disciplines to excel in each of them. As a result of this synthesis he made major breakthroughs in algebra, classical mechanics and optics. 'They [polymaths] made contributions to particular disciplines because of, not in spite of, their broad interests', insists Root-Bernstein. And it is polymaths such as these, he is convinced, to whom we will owe the greatest synthetic breakthroughs of the future. This is confirmed by historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. 'The best thinkers in any one field tend also to be good in others, which are mutually enriching’. Martin Kemp, the word's leading authority on Leonardo da Vinci confirms that one of the characteristics you'll find of polymaths generally is that they see links where we see separations - for Leonardo everything’s linked up'. 

No matter how specialised we claim to be, we are consistently borrowing ideas from other 'fields' (whether consciously or subconsciously) in order to seek creative, novel solutions. This might mean using a specialist skill (be it law, carpentry or health) to make money and become successful in business; insights as a soldier to contribute to government policy, scholarly debate or daily life; use of science in cooking; psychology to explain economics; and so on. Having a diverse range of skills, knowledge and experiences, stimulates an ability to see the bigger picture - which in turn allows for creative breakthrough. This link was aptly explained by SteveJobs, perhaps the most influential creator of the twenty-first century:

  Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesise new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. (Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1995)

A synthesis, it appears, occurs in the subconscious that somehow enables us to eventually arrive at creative ideas. This notion was recognised over fifty years ago by the creative advertising mogul James Webb Young in his acclaimed book A Technique for Producing New Ideas: 'An idea is no more or less thank a new combination of old elements, he said… ’Insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales… To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge.

This is certainly true for the modern interdisciplinary scholar and intellectual polymath Vaclav Smil, who argues that the complexity of the real world demands many perspectives (including historical appraisals) and requires the tracing of many linkages'. It is especially true for those at the forefront of scientific breakthroughs today. Scientific polymath Ray Kuraweil attributes the solution to the great technological problems of our age to this ability to make connections: 'Increasingly, the solutions to problem are found at the intersection of multiple fields. For example, my work in speech recognition involved speech science, linguistics, mathematical modelling, psychoacoustics and computer science'. 

Psychologists have consistently recognised this. Lewis Terman found that there are few persons who achieve great eminence in one field without displaying more than average ability in one or more other fields. Roberta Milgram found that career success in any discipline is better correlated with one or more intellectually stimulating and intensive avocational interests than with IQ, grades, standardised test scores or any combination of these. 

Historians too have found the same. Historian of science Paul Cranfield highlighted that among the group that discovered biophysics in the mid- nineteenth century, for example, there was a direct correlation between the number and range of avocations each individual pursued, the number of major discoveries he made, and his subsequent status as a scientist. Another historian, Minor Mvers, studied the lives of many great figures from the Renaissance through to the modern era and discovered a correlation between the range of developed abilities and the diversity and importance of an individual's contributions. He concluded that the greater the diversity of knowledge and skill set that an individual can integrate, the greater the number of resultant novel and useful permutations.

Writer Andrew Robinson's investigations into the lives of polymaths Thomas Young, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray (he has written biographies of each) show that there is an evident link between polymathy and creativity. "A significant number of exceptional creators have worked in more than one domain' he says, providing the example of breakthroughs in decipherment by Young and prodigious twentieth-century Englishman Michael Ventris: "In both cases - Ventris and Young - their decipherment breakthroughs depended on their knowledge of disparate domains, which their scholarly rivals did not have'. 'Their best ideas' he wrote, 'arose from their versatility'. This is confirmed by educationalist and creativity thinker Ken Robinson, who says, 'creativity depends on interactions between feeling and thinking, and across different disciplinary boundaries and fields of ideas'

— Nagarjuna, Buddhist philosopher (150-250)

Intimately related to unity is context. Context is the consideration of a particular object or phenomena in relation to the bigger picture that surrounds it, with a view to better understanding the original object. In order to grasp the context, one needs to investigate and consider a multitude of (closely and distantly) related phenomena - allowing for a 360°, multidimensional analysis. The importance of this approach, a hallmark of the polymath, was advocated by Hegel and then emphasised by Dewey who maintained that neglect of context was the gravest mistake philosophers make. But this mistake is certainly not confined to philosophers. Polymath Rabindranath Tagore provides the analogy of schoolchildren making sense of a sentence: 

Children, when they begin to learn each separate letter of the alphabet, find no pleasure in it, because they miss the real purpose of the lesson; in fact, while letters claim our attention only in themselves and as isolated things, they fatigue us. They become a source of joy to us only when they combine into words and sentences and convey an idea.

The perils of contextual ignorance can be demonstrated endlessly in every sphere of life. Countless quotes from books, speeches and religious texts, for example, have been clumsily (or sometimes cunningly) extracted and used out of context, leading to grave misunderstandings that have often had disastrous consequences. Consider the meaninglessness (or 'misleadingness') of a single verse if taken out of a great sonnet; or of one chapter out of a great novel or of one equation from its whole theory; or of one note from a symphony; or of one square inch of a large painting. 'Nothing is what it is except in the context in which it is situated', says lain McGilchrist, Take it out and it changes its nature'. This tendency to isolate objects from their environment is what philosopher Edgar Morin referred to as ‘blind intelligence’. 

Some Darwinists claim that the human brain necessarily developed a specialising, focused tendency because this aided survival during the process of natural selection. But this assumption needs rethinking. True survival requires a real understanding not just of the threat or opportunity at hand, but of all surrounding and related threats and opportunities too. That is, for survival, the right hemisphere of the brain is equally important to survival as the left. Treating each threat in isolation from the bigger picture would often have been suicidal. 

Polymaths understand that to survive is to understand and to understand truly requires a contextual, holistic assessment of any given subject or situation. It also requires utmost attention, and the right hemisphere of the brain - which is responsible for contextual and holistic thinking - according to cognitive scientists, controls four-fifths of overall attention. McGilchrist gives the example of animals in the wild: they must stay focused on food when they are eating, but they must also simultaneously stay vigilant about their surroundings - the left hemisphere of their brain is responsible for the narrow focus on the food and the right is responsible for a broader form of attention (looking out for predators and mates, for example).

So for survival, both intense focus and contextual thinking is needed in equal measure. Indeed our current obsession with the particular rather than the general, with facts rather than overall rules is, according to statistician and philosopher Nassim Nicolas Taleb, one of main reasons why we remain unprepared for 'Black Swans' (improbable yet inevitable extreme events such as market crashes and terrorist attacks).

— Hui Ssu

Diversifying your knowledge is one thing. Unifying it, performing a masterful synthesis to bring about a vision of the whole is another. Nicolas Copernicus, whose heliocentric revolution was born out of a process of universal learning, Brew frustrated at the method of the emerging 'specialist' astronomers of his day:

With them it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head, and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather than man.

Since the Renaissance, Western thinkers largely adopted the reductionist approach to science and philosophy, pioneered primarily by the French philosopher René Descartes. The Cartesian way saw the world in terms of individual foundations, certain building blocks which could be best understood through reductionist analysis. For 300 years this approach had gone a long way in investigating and explaining various natural phenomena.

But by the beginning of the twentieth century a group of scientists realised that knowledge in the sciences was becoming increasingly fragmented, causing people to lose sight of the inherent connections between, and unity of, all natural phenomena. This breed of scientific thinkers sought to revert to the traditional, pre-Enlightenment mode of holistic thought, which they developed into a scientific framework termed Systems Thinking (developed by Soviet polymath Alexander Bogdanov and popularised by Austrian-American biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy). This new scientific paradigm inspired a new ecological movement (whose thinking was described as 'deep ecology), of which James Lovelock's groundbreaking Gaia Theory of the Earth is the most popular manifestation. Indeed it was one of the pioneers of the ecological movement in the United States, Barry Commoner, who insisted that everything is connected to everything else'.

Systems Thinking, according to one of the movement's foremost living Proponents Fritjof Capra, refers essentially to 'connectedness, relationships and context'. Its premise is that the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts and that relationships between objects are primary and objects themselves secondary (as objects are themselves nothing but networks, embedded in larger networks). So knowledge is not a 'building' but instead a 'network', according to systems thinkers.

Capra contributed to Systems Thinking by importing elements of Eastern philosophy to better understand modern Western science, namely through his 1975 bestseller The Tao of Physics. His study into the thinking of Leonardo da Vinci - whom he unveiled as the original systems thinker- confirmed its link with polymathy. Today, the practical value of Systems Thinking has been recognised in many fields and its principles have been applied and adopted by leaders and managers in business and government as well as within many intellectual disciplines including economics, ecology; philosophy and more.

"I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity"  – Gottfried Leibniz

Going a step further than the idea that there are connections between some fields is to suggest that all fields are inextricably connected - as demonstrated by Aristotle's 'Tree of Life' and more recently Fritjof Capra's ‘Web of Life'. A.J. Jacobs, editor of Esquire, who as a part of one of his "lifestyle experiments' chose to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, concluded that: 'everything is connected like a worldwide version of the six-degrees-of-separation game'. Edwin Hubble recognised that the perception and segmentation of knowledge is simply a man-made pro-cess, whereas reality is actually one unified whole. 'Equipped with his five senses', he said, 'man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science'. 

This human obsession with the compartmentalisation and branding of fields and disciplines - fuelled in part by the 'information explosion' - is a relatively recent adoption by society and thus by the human mind. Before the European Enlightenment, disciplinary boundaries were not rigidly fixed and it was therefore easier to pursue multiple fields of study without the "dangers of straying'. In fact there was no such notion as 'straying there existed a recognition that everything in the cosmos was inextricably connected in a way that necessarily required the investigation of multiple aspects of it. This holistic approach to life and thought was considered the norm for the earlier polymaths for whom the unity of knowledges, branches on a common tree, reflected the unity of the cosmos!

The prevailing philosophy of each society in human history has had some part to play in encouraging polymathy, albeit for differing reasons. But there is a common thread weaving through each of these world views, regardless of time and place. This thread is the holistic outlook - one that can be found in Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Christian, European Renaissance and West African Yoruba philosophies, as well as in Confucian, Taoist, Islamic, Hindu, Polynesian and Mayan cosmological frameworks. Historian of science and Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr confirms this:

One might say that the aim of all Islamic sciences - and, more generally speaking, all of the medieval and ancient cosmological sciences - is to show the unity and interrelatedness of all that exists, so that, in contemplating the unity of the cosmos, man may be led to the unity of the Divine Principle, of which the unity of Nature is the image.

For example, the Islamic concept of Tawheed, which alludes to the oneness of God and the unity of the cosmos was what motivated an entire era of Muslim polymathy. Nasr elucidates: 

Tawheed in Arabic not only means unity but 'to make one' -integration. So integration was one of the most important consequences of Islamic Revelation. The Quran itself and its message of unity is why classical Islamic civilisation always emphasised the importance of polymathy and was why it produced so many polymaths.

While Muslims in fact became known as the muwahidun or the 'unifiers, such unity of this Divine Principle was recognised in most societies: to Aboriginal tribes it was arungquiltha, to Polynesian tribes mana, to Mesoamerican tribes waken. As Frijof Capra, physicist and author of the Tao of Physics confirms:

The fundamental interconnectedness of all  phenomena, which is the central insight of polymaths who are systemic thinkers, is also the fundamental insight of Eastern spiritual traditions, from Hinduism and Buddhism to Taoism.

The thirteenth-century Christian philosopher and polymath Thomas Aquinas described how theology could bring all our areas of knowledge together, offering a glimpse of God's own knowledge, which is the single and simple vision of everything'. Influenced by this, Cambridge scholar Keith Eyeons, author of The Theology of Everything, explains how the Divine Unity was seen by Christian polymaths as the original source, and how that naturally inferred the interconnectedness of everything:

God is the source of the rational structures of the universe investigated by scientists. God also has a glory and a beauty which is partly glimpsed through creation. Furthermore, God is love, and the Christian belief in the Trinity suggests that there are relationships of love within the threefold nature of God. Human relationships and communities therefore reflect something of the character of the divine consciousness which shapes the universe. Combining those theological ideas indicates that, for example, physics, art, and friendship are all connected.

Whether or not Leonardo da Vinci, our quintessential polymath, held the same outlook because of his Christian beliefs is not clear. We do know, however, that he was interested in the holistic ideas of the East. Martin Kemp, the world's foremost expert on Leonardo confirmed this:

Leonardo spoke to sea captains to enquire about other cultures. He would have been particularly interested in the more holistic philosophies which often characterised thought outside of European specialised thought, and thought in which rather the rigid procedures of empirical data are less prevalent and less dominant.

In contending that everything is inextricably connected, Leonardo believed strongly that one discipline could not be fully understood without the firm comprehension of several others. He often pointed to the fundamental connections between painting, music, poetry, philosophy and science. 'He who despises painting loves neither philosophy nor nature" he said, 'music may be called the sister of painting' and 'if poetry treats of moral philosophy, painting has to do with natural philosophy. The entire world (and the knowledge of it), according to Leonardo, is one big (Italian!) family. Indeed, it is because he didn't see things in categories that his notes seem so sporadic - he switched between subjects naturally because he saw everything as connected. As Kemp says:

Leonardo was a kind of pathological lateral thinker . . . so when exploring anatomy, he'll be looking at the heart, the movement of water . . . And when exploring movement of water, he'll be thinking about the curling of hair, and so on - it would be an infinite spiralling on of these related interests, and underneath all this variety there is a common thing, a cause and effect.

But the holistic outlook is by no means exclusive to ancient, premodern philosophies and religious cosmologies. It is also a feature of the modern scientific paradigm. E.O. Wilson, regarded by many as one of the world's leading scientists and a champion of reason and the scientific method, himself calls for the unity of knowledge in his book Consilience. 'A united system of knowledge', he argues, 'is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality'. This world view, according to E.0. Wilson, is the natural state of the human conscience. He emphasises that the unification of knowledge 'gratifies impulses that rise from the admirable side of human nature' and in fact 'eives ultimate purpose to intellect'.

Many of the world's greatest thinkers in the history of modern Western science and philosophy have commented on the usefulness (and sometimes indispensability) of this outlook. Again, it is of no surprise that many of these were in fact polymaths. Goethe saw nature as 'one great harmonious whole' and Humboldt had a 'habit of viewing the Globe as a great whole'. Buckminster Fuller emphasised the world as being a single entity or an 'unfragmented whole' and expressed a firm belief in its absolute unity and the consequent need for the 'comprehensivist' - someone likely to have a more rounded understanding of the cosmos. It is a method of thought that treats everything in the world as part of one single field within which everything is interconnected.

Although holism is an ancient philosophy with its roots in Hindu cosmology, it has been an essential aspect of Western thought for centuries (Kant, Spinoza, Hegel and Nietzsche were heavily influenced by it). In fact 'holism' as a philosophical term was coined by none other than one of the twentieth century's eminent polymaths, Jan Smuts, who in his book Holism and Evolution (1927) called for the unity of all things and knowledge. It alludes to what scientists, artists and philosophers have long considered to be a 'vanishing point' - a geometric notion with philosophical implications, where all of our particular areas of enquiry, knowledge and understanding eventually converge.

This insistence on the inseparability of various seemingly disparate domains is still shared by many of today's polymaths, whether scientific or artistic. 'I see everything as connected, and I am motivated to look for connections largely because nothing makes sense to me in isolation', says philosopher and polymath, Roger Scruton. 'Many scientists acknowledge this. Not only can you not understand biology without seeing it in terms of the laws of physics, the laws of physics must themselves be understood in

terms of their application in biology'.

When asked about which from acting, poetry, music and painting was his favourite, artistic polymath Vigo Mortensen replied: "I don't really separate them; they are all the same thing'. Another artistic polymath Billy Childish feels similarly: I don't identify myself as a writer or painter or musician, but as someone on the path to realisation. For me it's a spiritual life path'. Creativity to such individuals also comes naturally. David Stewart, the musician often described as a modern 'Renaissance man', said, 'People talk about thinking outside the box? Well, for me, I never even saw a box’. 

Curiosity, which is an essential driver of the Polymath, is embedded in our biology as well as our consciousness. There is an overwhelming consensus among sociologists that curiosity is one of the fundamental traits of the human condition – a natural disposition that exists in all humans regardless of class, race or gender. This is supported by evolutionary biology, which has proved time and again that humans are genetically programmed to be curious. Primates, for example, will work longer and harder to discover what is on the other side of a trapdoor, more than they would even for food or sex. Indeed, zoologist Desmond Morris, a renowned scholar of human and animal behaviour (incidentally also a successful surrealist painter), concluded in his 1967 bestseller The Naked Apethat ‘all mammals have a strong exploratory urge’, and that humans are the most inquisitive of them all:

 

 

According to behavioural scientist and professor of neuroeconomics, George Lowenstein, curiosity is simply an urge that arises from when we feel a gap ‘between what we know and what we want to know’. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because that’s how we scratch the itch. Firstly, this is because the brain has a natural dislike for ambiguity or uncertainty; and curiosity is what is activated to dispel this. Secondly, inadequate optical (or for that matter, any) stimulation causes the brain to automatically search for a way out of boredom to achieve the ‘optimal balance of arousal states’. Our desire for abstract information, which is essentially the cause of curiosity, begins as a dopaminergic craving, rooted in the same primal pathway ‘that also responds to sex, drugs and rock and roll’. It is no wonder that Aristotle proclaimed that ‘all men by nature desire knowledge and Leonardo concluded that ‘learning never exhausts the mind’. Charles van Doren in his History of Knowledge Underscored the power and timelessness of this human attribute:  

 

 

Martin Kemp, leading expert on Leonardo Da Vinci, confirms this point: 

 

The Islamic approach to knowledge is exemplary. Muhammad was known to have encouraged people to ‘seek knowledge, from the cradle to the grave’and to ‘pursue knowledge wherever you may findit’, stating that ‘seeking knowledge is a duty upon every Muslim’ and in fact ‘for him who embarks on the path of seeking knowledge, Allah will ease for him the way to paradise’.He is also said to have declared that‘the Ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of a martyr’ and‘one hour of thinking is equivalent to seventy years of worship’ and that‘one learned man gives more trouble to the devil than a thousand ignorant worshipers’. Muhammad was referring to both worldly (ulm akliya) and religious (ulm nakliya) knowledge; one did not suffice without the other.

The link between intelligence and curiosity is important, but it can be argued that curiosity is probably the prime driver of accomplishment. Indeed, it was Einstein that famously proclaimed: ‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious’. As well as being a natural human tendency, curiosity or put otherwise ‘the thirst for knowledge’ has been encouraged through various cultures, religions and philosophies for millennia. 

But like intelligence and creativity, curiosity can take one of two routes in the mind. The first is one of depth, whereby the individual probes deeper and deeper into a particular subject, typical of the specialist who is itching to take a linear route to the top of the pyramid. The second, which is of boundless breadth – and where the pyramid does not even exist – is the route of a polymath. The polymath is broadly curious; man-made disciplinary boundaries cannot shackle his mind to one particular field. He pursues a line of enquiry, like an investigative journalist or a detective, and maintains an open mind whether that question requires him to learn biomimicry or plumbing, astrophysics or masonry. As Montaigne said, ‘let the man who is in search of knowledge fish for it where it lies’. 

Asking questions about multiple (related and seemingly unrelated) phenomena is the hallmark of a curious mind. Paul Robeson from a young age had developed ’a love for learning, a ceaseless quest for truth in all its fullness’.  Indeed the child is the ultimate enquirer, the pre-polymath, and although adults do not lose the curiosity that seems to be a primordial human trait, their curiosity deteriorates in quality and type. They become more preoccupied with the howthan the why; more concerned with the information rather than the understanding of it. 

Critical thinkers such as polymathic philosophers continue the child’s legacy in a more sophisticated and systemized manner – as do ‘eccentric’ artists, hobbyists and ‘trivia buffs’ in a similarly playful manner –  whereas most other adults are preoccupied with specific practicalities of everyday life. Adults think that they know what they need to know and as such become increasingly closed-minded. They lose their sense of wonder. This tendency has been cemented in the psyche over the years through the development of myths, parables and proverbs that warn of the perils of curiosity. The Pandora’s Box parable and the idea that ‘curiosity killed the cat’ illustrate the pejorative way in which curiosity has been seen in society. This culture has its roots in institutional elitism and the concealment of knowledge from the masses, its legacy being a mind that is conditioned to ‘mind its own business’. 

is vanity." – Al Ghazali

Experience enhances the intellect, and vice versa. As the youngest MLA in the country at the age of 25, Shrikanth Jichkar was elected to the Indian parliament before serving as Minister for various government departments and on various committees dealing with issues as varied as finance, irrigation, tax, transport, power, patents and planning. As a man of action, he also founded the HAM Radio Association, worked on effective disaster management for flood victims around India, and became one of the country’s most prominent priests.

It was during his professional career that Jichkar simultaneously pursued the path of vast scholarship, spending every summer and winter between 1972 and 1990 writing (a total of 42) exams for various advanced degree qualifications. He eventually attained 20 postgraduate degrees including an MBBS (medicine), LLM (law), MBA (business) as well as Masters Degrees in public administration, sociology, history, philosophy, English literature, political science, archaeology, psychology and a DLitt in Sanskrit – ultimately becoming the most academically qualified person in modern history. Unsurprisingly, he had one of the biggest personal libraries in India, with over 52,000 books.

Jichkar was a doer, who consistently incorporated the process of thinking throughout his studies. Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand was the opposite: he was a thinker who made it a point to incorporate real action into his life. He began his career as an aeronautical engineer, but soon diverted his attention toward mathematics and particularly the philosophy of mathematics. He studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, who was particularly impressed by the young philosopher’s genius. His main scholarly contributions were in the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, as well as in logic and psychology. Although his published output was not as voluminous as his fellow academics, he is still considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. But philosophy, he insisted ‘is not a theory but an activity’, and he often felt compelled to retreat from academia into the ‘real world’ for this reason. During World War I he served as an officer in the Austrian army and was decorated several times for his courage, and during World War II he worked as a hospital orderly in London to satisfy his urge for social and manual work. He also spent time working as a teacher and gardener.  Furthermore, he gained renown for his photography (his work has recently been exhibited at the London School of Economics and at Cambridge University) and his architecture (he designed and built his own house), stressing the importance of visualisation and aestheticism to philosophy as a scholarly discipline.

These days the ‘thinker’ and the ‘doer’ are separated – it is assumed that leaders don’t have the time to muse and intellectuals don’t have the pragmatism of the leader. But like Churchill, Smuts and Roosevelt, some of the most influential leaders in history have been scholar-statesmen who engaged in leadership roles as well as being polymathic intellectuals. At the pinnacle of the Roman Empire, polymaths played active roles in society as well as making invaluable contributions to scholarship. According to historian of ideas Peter Watson, they were interested in ‘utilitas’, the usefulness of ideas, the power they could bring to affairs. They were thus practical philosophers – scholars in the sciences, humanities and the arts, but who also held public offices and contributed to society as soldiers, jurists, governors, librarians and politicians. Their philosophical investigations supported their professional careers and vice versa. Marcus Tullius Cicero enjoyed equal acclaim as a politician, lawyer and orator as well as a scholar of language, philosophy and political science. Pliny the Elder was not only an important statesman and military leader during the reign of Vespasian, but also the author of the Naturalis Historia, one of the most comprehensive encyclopaedias to have survived from the Roman era, and also made contributions to history and grammar.

According to Watson, the likes of Varro, Cicero and Pliny were interested in ‘utilitas’, the usefulness of ideas, the power they could bring to affairs’. They were thus practical philosophers – scholars in the sciences, humanities and the arts, but who also held public offices and contributed to society as soldiers, jurists, governors, librarians and politicians. Their philosophical investigations supported their professional careers and vice versa. Similarly in the Islamic world, the polymath existed both as a thinker

and a doer – an approach evidently inspired by the Quran and its articulator. Ziauddin Sardar, who conducted a thorough study of the Quran in his book Reading the Quran concludes: ‘I have come to see the Qur’an as a text that simultaneously promotes thinking and doing’. With practical realities such as warfare, governance and trade at the heart of the empire (or empires, as they became), Muslim polymaths tended also to have excelled in society in practical as well as intellectual roles – as merchants, soldiers, jurists, diplomats, physicians and imams. Many of the greatest polymaths in history – Leonardo, Franklin, Kuo, Robeson, Tagore, Schweitzer, Goethe, Morris, Rizal, Imhotep and Chen – demonstrated the same tendency.

This type of polymathy is perhaps the most impressive and valuable to society as it demonstrates both intellectual and experiential versatility, as well as the use of various sources of knowledge. Yet some societies have been bent on separating the thinker and the doer, often valuing one at the expense of the other. A vivid example of this was during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, when there was a stark distinction between the bourgeois intellectual and the working class labourer. British polymath John Ruskin famously voiced his frustration at this:

We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

The world has not changed much in this regard. Society still likes to separate the thinkers and the doers – so much so that it seems natural for be people to fall into either category. How common is it to have a fireman who is also a historian of art or a theologian who also works as a car mechanic? How many intellectuals rely on corporations and governments to enact their ideas and how many businessmen and statesman rely on intellectuals to advise them and ghost-write their books? The status of both thinker and doer must be equalised, as it was during the times when merchants, musicians and artisans were regarded as highly as poets, philosophers and historians and consequently when societies were at their most vibrant, creative and polymathic. One should recognise that both thought and action have equal value to individual and societal development; and that each are required, to varying degrees, to excel in any profession.

Chinese philosopher and polymath Zhu Xi said that knowledge and action were indivisible components of truly intelligent activity. ‘Knowledge and action always require each other’, he said. ‘It is like a person who cannot walk without legs although he has eyes, and who cannot see without eyes although he has legs’. Some people undergo a more reflective period in their lives at one stage, and at another prefer a more hands-on occupation. An inbuilt capacity to both think and do exist in all of us, even if inclinations and tendencies may vary according to circumstances and societal influence.

Unfortunately, the monopolisation of knowledge through history is as true with gender as it is with class. A long history of chauvinism has resulted in outrageously few recorded female polymaths vis-à-vis their male counterparts. It is men who repeatedly show up as ‘polymaths’ and ‘Renaissance men’ in our records. One of the reasons for this is that while many female polymaths did exist they were omitted from the records or simply overlooked by those (overwhelmingly men) who wrote and recorded history. This is because most (though certainly not all) societies in human history have been largely male-dominated.

While it is true that historians are principally responsible for ignoring (or simply concealing) the polymathic achievements of women over the years, the unfortunate reality remains that very few female polymaths actually did exist in the public sphere. This has less to do with their ability or propensity to polymathise (in fact the opposite was probably the case) and more to do with cultural norms and the barriers imposed on them by the restrictive societies of their time.

With some exceptions such as the Kemetic royalty, bluestockings of Enlightenment Europe, the Al-Muhadditath of early Islam and courtesans of Tang China, women were seldom included in intellectual and professional circles prior to the modern age. While the male courtier, for example, was traditionally respected as well mannered, multi-talented, widely educated and cultured, his female counterpart the courtesan – while in many cases being equally cultured and multi-talented – was automatically (and often inaccurately) associated with sexual promiscuity. The Japanese Geisha, many of whom were artistic polymaths, are examples of this sexist bias. Modern Hollywood suffers from a similar phenomenon. The versatility of men is welcomed, whereas women are too often branded according to sex appeal. Hedy Lamarr, for example, one of the most popular Hollywood film actresses in the 1940s, was also a talented inventor. She devised a frequency-hopping system to prevent torpedoes from being jammed that is still used today in Bluetooth devices. Academy Award winner Natalie Portman was also a mathematics prodigy. There are several such examples. Going back to the grassroots women have traditionally lived a domestic life through much of history and so contributions to society, scholarship and culture in multiple fields became less possible for them. Cultural critic and feminist scholar Gayathri Chakravorthi Spivak explained this:

The prospect of polymathy has not been available to women, because
women funnily enough have been defined as private persons. Even I, who had a relatively liberal upbringing in a highly educated and cultured family in India, believed that women did not have academic personalities. The ones that achieved in one field became, to quote Derrida, ‘honorary males’. Even if she does go on to become polymathic, she’s then detested by other women because of ideological issues and so on. It’s a very sad thing.

Even in domestic life, the female’s ability to be polymathic has nonetheless been adequately demonstrated, juggling between various tasks such as child rearing, food preparation, educating, entertaining, farming and processing. In traditional South Asian culture, for example, ghargrasti (literally translating as ‘house management’) is essentially a multifaceted role in its own right that requires effective switching between various cognitive aptitudes, strands of knowledge and emotional and intellectual attributes. These may have included cooking and cleaning, handling household finances, raising and educating children, skilfully managing social relationships, being steadfast in caring for the family, entertaining guests appropriately and maintaining one’s own appearance among many other tasks. 

Various studies have now come to show that women are in fact better multi-taskers and adjustors than men. ‘The ability and practice of epistemological shifting [needed by the polymath] does exist among women’, says Spivak, ‘but it has not been allowed to enter the public sphere’.

Women prior to the modern period, particularly in Europe, were marginalised from most forms of social, professional and intellectual life. The Enlightenment itself was ludicrously male dominated. It was however acknowledged by British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead that uneducated, well-travelled women during this period were actually often more cultured, wiser and better-informed than their husbands, as male education after the Industrial Revolution was merely the installation of inert (disconnected, useless) ideas.

Many female polymaths lived in the shadows of their husbands or lovers. This was particularly true during the French Enlightenment when the wives and lovers of many intellectuals often served as their salon hostesses, translators, researchers but who in many cases made notable contributions in their own right. Marie Lavoisier, wife of French nobleman and chemist Antoine Lavoisier, was a linguist, chemist and artist who would translate her husband’s books as well as illustrate them. She also travelled
with him as his researcher and ran salons where she would entertain other prominent figures such as Benjamin Franklin. But she was too female to be acknowledged as a polymath.

Émilie du Chatâlet was the lover of Voltaire, who once said of her that ‘she is a great man whose only fault is that she was a woman’. She was a mathematician, physicist and translator who also wrote a critical analysis of the Bible, developed a system of financial derivatives to pay off her debts, wrote a variety of discourses on philosophy and linguistics and became an activist in support of female education. Yet she’s still known primarily as ‘Voltaire’s lover’.

Although there are numerous examples of acknowledged and acclaimed female scholars, artists and leaders from around the world, very few have been known publically to have accomplishments in multiple domains. Examples such as Ban Zhao, Lubna of Corboba, Hildegard von Bingen, Anna Maria von Schurman, Maria Agnesi and Florence Nightingale – one whom
we’ll explore in the following chapter – are rare. Even as women began to enter the public sphere professionally in the modern era, they had to work twice as hard as men, and specialisation and single-field focus was seen as the way to go about proving themselves worthy.

The idea of the ‘bluestocking’ (or the ‘learned lady’) in Europe only came to being in the late eighteenth century. Women’s academic institutions only sprung up worldwide in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Seven Sisters colleges in the United States, Girton and Bedford colleges in the UK, Tsuda College in Japan, and Lahore College for Women in India became among the first established, as were new co-ed universities such as the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. 

And so, unfortunately, we’ll find a disproportionate focus on male polymaths in much of this book, even if the notion is equally applicable (and indeed pertinent) across genders.