Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, I believe, due to the vast amount of information accumulated in all different fields in the last century or so, polymaths have simply ceased to exist. The last true polymath I know of was John von Neumann. I guess it just can't be done anymore.

View on HN

On the other hand, it would seem that many of the top experts today are masters at mashing up the frontiers of multiple fields. Just think of all of the applications of Neuroscience + X (CS, Philosophy, Psychology, Chemistry, etc.). Sure, there are few (no?) people today that can claim mastery of 10 or 20 fields, but most of the cutting edge research does seem to require expert knowledge of 2 or 3.

I'd put Alan Kay forward as a living polymath. It's a shame that research has become siloed -- so many great discoveries came about because someone had insights perpendicular to their field.

Are you talking about Alan Kay as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay ? He doesn’t seem to have made any major contributions to physics, mathematics, the natural sciences or basically any other field, apart from software engineering.

Polymath needn't mean 'makes major contributions to multiple fields' (though, of course it, it can.) It means someone has deep knowledge across a wide array of subjects, and typically draws inspiration from fields which are orthogonal to their primary field of interest. In Kay's case, it's applying the concepts of biology, genetics, mathematics, and architecture, to computer science, to create Object Oriented Programming.

A major breakthrough in his primary field (computer science) came about because of a wide (rather than narrow) field of study.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com