Who is history's greatest polymath?
Painters who did anatomy, physicists who ran mints, abbesses who wrote medical books.
1Leonardo da Vinci
Painter, anatomist, engineer and hydraulicist, and the standard every other polymath is measured against.
2Benjamin Franklin
Printer, physicist, inventor, diplomat and memoirist, with a hall-of-fame entry in chess and another in swimming.
3Isaac Newton
Built classical mechanics and calculus, then ran the Royal Mint and chased alchemy.
4Aristotle
Wrote the founding texts of logic, biology, ethics, poetics and physics.
5Archimedes
Mathematician, physicist and military engineer of Syracuse.
6Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Co-invented calculus, designed calculating machines and wrote on law, history and theology.
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7Ibn Sina
Physician and philosopher whose Canon of Medicine taught Europe for six centuries.
8Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Poet and dramatist who also published on optics, botany and geology.
9Hildegard of Bingen
Abbess who composed music, wrote medical texts and recorded her own visions.
10Al-Biruni
Measured the Earth's radius, compared religions and wrote on astronomy, minerals and history.
11Blaise Pascal
Founded probability theory, built a mechanical calculator and wrote the Pensées.
12Zhang Heng
Han astronomer and poet who built the first seismoscope and an armillary sphere.
13Émilie du Châtelet
Translated Newton into French and corrected him on the mathematics of energy.
14Thomas Young
Physician who proved light behaves as a wave and helped decode Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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