Polymath

A Polymath is a person with encyclopedic, broad or varied knowledge. Related terms are Renaissance Man and Homo Universalis.

Some recognized polymaths

Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait

Maimonides Albertus Magnus Roger Bacon Giotto di Bondone Nicholas of Cusa Leonardo da Vinci Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Albrecht Dürer Nicolaus Copernicus Galileo Galilei Leon Battista Alberti (A Renaissance ideal) Francis Bacon

Thomas Hobbes Rene Descartes Blaise Pascal Isaac Newton Gottfried Leibniz Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Benjamin Franklin Immanuel Kant Charles Willson Peale Thomas Jefferson Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. William Blake

William Thornton Samuel Morse Mary Somerville Harriet Martineau John Stuart Mill Paul Morphy Charles Peirce Rudolf Steiner H. G. Wells Albert Schweitzer Pavel Florensky

Polymaths and self-education

See also: Autodidacticism

Autodidacticism (Self-education) is the practice of education and/or learning skills without the guidance of schools/schoolmasters (i.e., teachers, professors, institutions, mentors). A person who is self-taught is an autodidact.

Frequently people who are polymaths are also autodidacts, and vice versa.

See also

• Seven Sages of Greece
• Skepticism
• Epistemology