Natural selection shows that cooperating specialists do better. So I'm not so sure how useful are these efforts to educate new generations of polymaths.
> Polymaths don’t simply know a lot, they understand what fields have in common.
According to the text, the polymath focuses on the intersection of fields. This is more specific than a generalist, that could know a lot of fields but have no particular experience in what is their connection.
I don't know if I agree with the text definition of what a polymath is. It is, however, what they meant.
I like this guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou
who basically plays the same game as Derrida. Except Derrida plays it very sloppily even if you might blame yourself for not understanding it because he is analyzing a difficult text in German in French and now you're reading a bad translation in English.
Badiou on the other hand will mash up Marxism with difficult problems in math such as the Continuum Hypothesis. Unlike Derrida there's no doubt that he really understands the math and he did the hard work with the precision of continental analytic philosophy. He irritates many of the people who are irritated by Derrida for the same reasons except at the level of details Badiou is impeccable which would all the more infuriating if somebody tries to engage with it in order to refute it.
(Funny I found Badiou's concept of singulation to be very relevant to ontology in computing, particularly the distinction between individuals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)) and categories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language) in Wikipedia, particularly given that something can be an individual and a category at the same time... Which twists systems like OWL into knots.)
Academically, Marx was ahead of his time even if his prophecy that capitalism would be smashed by "the tendency for the rate of profit to decline" and the labor theory of value turned out to be bunk. He was popular in the 20th centuries and even David Bell chair of the social sciences department of Harvard and as ardent a supporter of the status quo as there ever was claimed to be Marxist. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Futurism [3] https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Contradictions-Capitalism-20...