Polymath
This is expressed in the term Renaissance man, often applied to the gifted people of that age who sought to develop their abilities in all areas of accomplishment: intellectual, artistic, social, physical, and spiritual.
[4][5][6] Von Wowern defined polymathy as "knowledge of various matters, drawn from all kinds of studies ... ranging freely through all the fields of the disciplines, as far as the human mind, with unwearied industry, is able to pursue them".
The earliest recorded use of the term in the English language is from 1624, in the second edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton;[7] the form polymathist is slightly older, first appearing in the Diatribae upon the first part of the late History of Tithes of Richard Montagu in 1621.
[11] Many notable polymaths[c] lived during the Renaissance period, a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th through to the 17th century that began in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spread to the rest of Europe.
A gentleman or courtier of that era was expected to speak several languages, play a musical instrument, write poetry, and so on; thus fulfilling the Renaissance ideal.
However, the original Latin word universitas refers in general to "a number of persons associated into one body, a society, company, community, guild, corporation, etc".
The dilettante demonstrates superficial breadth but tends to acquire skills merely "for their own sake without regard to understanding the broader applications or implications and without integrating it".
[17]: 857 Conversely, the polymath is a person with a level of expertise that is able to "put a significant amount of time and effort into their avocations and find ways to use their multiple interests to inform their vocations".
From the polymathy perspective, giftedness is the ability to combine disparate (or even apparently contradictory) ideas, sets of problems, skills, talents, and knowledge in novel and useful ways.
[25]: 161 Peter Burke, Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, discussed the theme of polymathy in some of his works.
However, from the 17th century on, the rapid rise of new knowledge in the Western world—both from the systematic investigation of the natural world and from the flow of information coming from other parts of the world—was making it increasingly difficult for individual scholars to master as many disciplines as before.
He poses that an ideal education should nurture talent in the classroom and enable individuals to pursue multiple fields of research and appreciate both the aesthetic and structural/scientific connections between mathematics, arts and the sciences.
[16] He utilized a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to recreate the emotions, voices and struggles of students as they tried to unravel Russell's paradox presented in its linguistic form.
He concludes by suggesting that fostering polymathy in the classroom may help students change beliefs, discover structures and open new avenues for interdisciplinary pedagogy.
Integration involves the capacity of connecting, articulating, concatenating or synthesizing different conceptual networks, which in non-polymathic persons might be segregated.
[39] For individuals, Ahmed says, specialisation is dehumanising and stifles their full range of expression whereas polymathy "is a powerful means to social and intellectual emancipation" which enables a more fulfilling life.
He observes that successful people in many fields have cited hobbies and other "peripheral" activities as supplying skills or insights that helped them succeed.
[43] Another study found that children scored higher in IQ tests after having drum lessons, and he uses such research to argue that diversity of domains can enhance a person's general intelligence.
The importance of recognising these limitations is a theme that Ahmed finds in many thinkers, including Confucius, Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Nicolas of Cusa.
[47] Polymaths include the great scholars and thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, who excelled at several fields in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and the arts.
[48] Well-known and celebrated polymaths include Avicenna, Leonardo da Vinci, Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz,[49] Robert Hooke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff,[50] Al-Biruni,[51] Hildegard of Bingen, Ibn al-Haytham, Rabindranath Tagore, Mikhail Lomonosov, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alan Turing, Benjamin Franklin, John von Neumann, Omar Khayyam, Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Poincaré, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johann Weikhard von Valvasor, René Descartes, Aristotle, Emperor Frederick II, Averroes, Archimedes, Hypatia, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Young, Sequoyah, Thomas Jefferson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Friedrich Engels, and William Whewell.
