Who is history's greatest polymath?

Painters who did anatomy, physicists who ran mints, abbesses who wrote medical books.

1. 1
   Leonardo da Vinci

   Painter, anatomist, engineer and hydraulicist, and the standard every other polymath is measured against.
2. 2
   Benjamin Franklin

   Printer, physicist, inventor, diplomat and memoirist, with a hall-of-fame entry in chess and another in swimming.
3. 3
   Isaac Newton

   Built classical mechanics and calculus, then ran the Royal Mint and chased alchemy.
4. 4
   Aristotle

   Wrote the founding texts of logic, biology, ethics, poetics and physics.
5. 5
   Archimedes

   Mathematician, physicist and military engineer of Syracuse.
6. 6
   Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

   Co-invented calculus, designed calculating machines and wrote on law, history and theology.
7. 7
   Ibn Sina

   Physician and philosopher whose Canon of Medicine taught Europe for six centuries.
8. 8
   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

   Poet and dramatist who also published on optics, botany and geology.
9. 9
   Hildegard of Bingen

   Abbess who composed music, wrote medical texts and recorded her own visions.
10. 10
    Al-Biruni

    Measured the Earth's radius, compared religions and wrote on astronomy, minerals and history.
11. 11
    Blaise Pascal

    Founded probability theory, built a mechanical calculator and wrote the Pensées.
12. 12
    Zhang Heng

    Han astronomer and poet who built the first seismoscope and an armillary sphere.
13. 13
    Émilie du Châtelet

    Translated Newton into French and corrected him on the mathematics of energy.
14. 14
    Thomas Young

    Physician who proved light behaves as a wave and helped decode Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Comments 1