What is a polymath? How people master many fields

A polymath is a person who knows several unrelated fields deeply enough to do original work in each, not just to talk about them. Leonardo da Vinci painted, designed machines and dissected bodies; Ibn Sina wrote both a medical textbook and a philosophy; Hildegard of Bingen composed music and wrote on medicine. The word comes from the Greek polymathēs, "having learned much."

In short

• A polymath has depth in several fields, not a smattering of many; that is what separates one from a dabbler.
• Polymaths were easier to be when the edge of knowledge in each field was close; specialization grew as that edge moved further out.
• Research on expertise suggests practice matters but explains less than people think, and that breadth and depth can be combined over a lifetime.

What makes someone a polymath, not just curious?

The test is depth. Plenty of people have many interests. A polymath has done work in several fields that people inside those fields would recognize as serious. A useful way to see it is to set the word beside the ones it gets confused with.

Word	Breadth	Depth	Example
Specialist	One field	Deep	A surgeon who does only knee replacements
Generalist	Many fields	Working knowledge	A family doctor, a newspaper editor
Dilettante	Many fields	Shallow, for pleasure	Someone who dips into every hobby
Polymath	Several fields	Deep in each	Leonardo in painting and anatomy

The Renaissance gave the idea another name, the "universal man" (uomo universale), which is why English also says "Renaissance man". The ideal was a person who cultivated every human capacity: art, science, letters, the body. Today "polymath" is the more common and less gendered word.

Who were the great polymaths?

Three lives, spread across five centuries, show what the word means in practice.

Who	Lived	Fields	Lasting work
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)	c. 970–1037	Medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics, physics	The Canon of Medicine; The Cure, a 22-volume philosophical summa
Hildegard of Bingen	1098–1179	Theology, music, medicine, natural science, language	Scivias; the songs of the Symphonia; Physica and Causae et Curae; an invented language, the Lingua Ignota
Leonardo da Vinci	1452–1519	Painting, sculpture, architecture, engineering, anatomy	The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, notebooks of machines and dissections

Ibn Sina, born near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, was a working physician and one of the most important philosophers of the Islamic world. The Latin translation of his Canon was the basis of medical teaching in European universities until the 17th century, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Hildegard ran a religious community on the Rhine and wrote visionary theology, about 400 surviving letters to popes and rulers, works on medicine and nature, and a body of chant still performed today. In 2012 the Catholic Church named her a Doctor of the Church, a title given to only a few dozen people (Vatican, 2012).

Leonardo is the type case. London's National Gallery describes him as "painter, sculptor, architect, designer, theorist, engineer and scientist." Many of his works were never finished, which is part of the polymath's story too: attention spread across many fields has to be paid for somewhere.

Why are there fewer polymaths now?

The short answer is that each field has grown so much that reaching its frontier takes far longer. The economist Benjamin Jones called this the "burden of knowledge". In a paper subtitled the "Death of the Renaissance Man", he argued that as knowledge piles up, innovators need more education before they can add to it, so they specialize more narrowly and work in teams more often, and he found evidence for this in data on inventors (Jones, 2005).

A rough illustration of why that bites. Suppose reaching the edge of a field takes 5 years of focused study. Mastering three fields costs 15 years, which fits inside a working life with room to spare. Now suppose each field takes 12 years: three cost 36 years, most of a career, before any original work in the third begins. The numbers are made up, but the shape is the point. Breadth didn't become less valuable; it became more expensive.

The other change is how knowledge is produced. A single person could once write a field's main textbook. Today, much original work comes from teams that bring specialists together, which spreads breadth across people instead of within one head.

What does research on expertise say about learning many fields?

The idea that anyone can master anything with about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is a popular version of research by the psychologist Anders Ericsson. A 2014 meta-analysis of 88 studies tested how much practice explains. Practice accounted for about 12% of the differences in performance overall: about 26% in games, 21% in music and 18% in sports, but about 4% in education and less than 1% in professions (Association for Psychological Science, 2014). Practice matters, but less than the popular version claims. The field clearly makes a difference, and the authors suggested that the age at which a person starts and abilities such as working memory may matter too.

The case for breadth rests on something other than practice. Specific skills seldom carry over directly to a distant field, but an idea or method borrowed from one field can open up another: Charles Darwin wrote that reading Thomas Malthus's essay on population helped him see how natural selection would work. And a 2008 study by Robert Root-Bernstein and colleagues, in the Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, found that Nobel laureates in science were more likely than other scientists to have serious arts or crafts hobbies. That is a correlation, not proof that painting makes better chemists.

Still argued

Researchers and writers disagree on whether breadth helps people do better work or mostly spreads them thin. One side points to inventors and scientists who borrowed methods across fields, and argues that early specialization is overrated. The other points to the burden of knowledge: at today's frontiers, the people who make advances are usually deep specialists working in teams. The evidence supports both pictures in different fields, and "polymath" is often applied in hindsight to people whose breadth happened to pay off.

Can someone become a polymath today?

Not quickly, and claims otherwise are worth doubting. What people who work across fields tend to do is build depth in one field first, then add a second over years, often where the two meet: a doctor who learns statistics, a programmer who learns music theory. Because each field takes years, the useful habits are the slow ones: reviewing what you've learned with spaced repetition so it doesn't fade, protecting time for focused study with something like the Pomodoro Technique, and the critical thinking to judge sources in a field where you are still a beginner.

The ancient world had no word for "scientist" and didn't separate philosophy from the study of nature, which is one reason so many early thinkers look like polymaths to modern eyes. The boundaries between fields are partly human-made, and the people who cross them often see what those inside them don't.

Check yourself

• What separates a polymath from a dilettante or a generalist?
• In your own words, why did the "burden of knowledge" make polymaths rarer?
• What did the 2014 meta-analysis find about how much practice explains, and why does the field matter?

Sources

• Ibn Sina (Avicenna) — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Proclaiming Saint Hildegard of Bingen a Doctor of the Universal Church — Benedict XVI, The Holy See, 2012
• Leonardo da Vinci — The National Gallery, London
• The Burden of Knowledge and the "Death of the Renaissance Man" — Benjamin F. Jones, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005
• Becoming an Expert Takes More Than Practice — Association for Psychological Science, 2014