The Ideal Polymaths - Leonardo Da Vinci, Alexander Von Humboldt, Athanasius Kircher

By definition, a polymath is someone whose knowledge spans a considerable number of various subject areas. In layman's terms, they are people who know a whole lot about a lot. The word is closely related to the common term Renaissance man, since the latter is one who is educated or who does extremely well in a broad variety of fields or subjects. On the other hand, because polymath is an ancient term, the meaning ascribed to polymaths in this day and age is substantially different than in olden times.

How is this so? For starters, in those early days of civilization, science was yet to be divided into its specific fields such as chemistry, astronomy, zoology, etc., for the reason that these labels were not yet created. Back then, science was unified, and its sole purpose was to build and organize knowledge about the entire universe. The result would be that there were no such things a specialized scientists (no chemists, no zoologists) - maybe an astronomer or an artist, though. So it would be completely natural for a scientist of such stature as Copernicus to be a physician, a mathematician, and an astronomer at the same time, since all these involved the construction of knowledge about the universe. Consequently, this would make Copernicus as well as Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon polymaths today.

Centuries ago, there were many significant polymaths, but there is no other polymath who is as celebrated and revered as Leonardo da Vinci, the archetypal Renaissance man. Even today, Leonardo da Vinci is usually referred to as the most talented man to have ever walked the face of this planet. Say this in one breath: he was an architect, anatomist, botanist, engineer, cartographer, geologist, mathematician, scientist, musician, painter, sculptor, inventor, and writer. Not only did Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa or drew the Vitruvian Man, he also conceptualized the calculator, helicopter, solar power - inventions that were only feasible one or two centuries ago.

Alexander von Humboldt is known as the last Renaissance man in civilization. He is known to have significantly contributed to every field of the natural sciences from botany to geology to zoology - Alexander von Humboldt also created the field of meteorology. But the most important contribution made by Alexander von Humboldt was his theory that all these varied scientific fields were interconnected, meaning that every living thing is connected to every part of nature.

Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century scholar, who was also known as "the master of a hundred arts." As a scholar, Athanasius Kircher is sometimes referred to as the father of Egyptology, since he was one of the first people to not only interpret hieroglyphic writing but to also relate it to other ancient forms of writing such as the Coptic languages. He was also a geologist, and probably the first person to scientifically understand the effects of microbes and microorganisms. The magnetic clock, the automaton, and the megaphone are inventions attributed to Athanasius Kircher.

Joseph Leidy was the first paleontologist to successfully excavate a complete fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur. Other scientific fields which were of interest to Joseph Leidy were parasitology, geology, and mineralogy. But the fame of Joseph Leidy rests on him becoming the first person to utilize a microscope in order to finally solve a murder case. A lot of people now refer to him as one of the founding fathers of forensic science.

Alexander Von Humboldt, Polymath and Renaissance Man

According to Charles Darwin, the Prussian explorer, geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived." In fact, it was during his famed voyages in Latin America that von Humboldt cultivated his modern scientific concepts and ideas, which garnered him prominence within the scientific community at that particular day and age. The central idea scientific thinking was that absolutely nothing on our planet could be fully comprehended in isolation. Every living thing had to be understood in relation to other fields of science such as astronomy or meteorology. As we will explain later, von Humboldt's thesis is not at all surprising, for the main reason that his scientific thinking expanded well beyond his respected field; consequently, he is now known to us as a celebrated polymath and the last Renaissance man in history.

When he was just a child, Alexander von Humboldt was known to his family and friends as "the little apothecary", since he developed a penchant for collecting and labeling different types of insects, plants, and seashells. Already his all-around interests in various phenomena, which would widen continually during his early education, foreshadow his future polymath expertise. Von Humboldt studied finance for half a year in the University of Frankfurt; one year later, he enrolled in the University of Gottingen, where he was able to listen wholeheartedly to the lectures of the revered archaeologist C.G. Heyne and the naturalist J.F. Blumenbach.

It was shortly after he published his first scientific treatise that centered his passions on travel. Here, he befriended Georg Forster, now known today as the founding father of modern scientific travel literature. In order to prepare for his future travels, he then studied commerce and foreign languages in the University of Hamburg, geology at the University of Freiberg under the teaching of A.G. Werner, astronomy and scientific engineering under J.G. Köhler and F.X. von Zach, and anatomy at the University of Jena under the famed anatomist and surgeon J.C. Loder. The vast field of knowledge of this Renaissance man would widen even more when von Humboldt made the acquaintance of the botanist Aimé Bonpland, and together they set off for the uncharted territories of Latin America.

With his extensive knowledge on the physical sciences, von Humboldt, now in Latin America, was able to collect important data concerning more or less every field of natural science: archaeology, botany, geology, geography, oceanography and zoology. Because of his polymath manner of thinking, he was bright enough to harmonize all these different fields of sciences into a single, prescient thesis. This theory stated that everything in nature is interconnected. For instance, biology, geology, and meteorology (a science that von Humboldt founded), determined where specific flora and fauna grew; another example proposed that the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean were joined long ago.

All these modern scientific views were to be published in a massive five-volume work called "Cosmos", but Alexander von Humboldt, the last Renaissance man, died before he could complete it. However, his mark on science remains indelible to this very day.