Top 31 Polymaths in History

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.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Omar Khayyam

   Persian mathematician and astronomer who solved cubic equations geometrically, reformed the calendar and wrote the quatrains of the Rubaiyat.
   714pts
3. 3
   Émilie du Châtelet

   Translated Newton into French and corrected him on the mathematics of energy.
   654pts
4. 4
   Thomas Young

   Physician who proved light behaves as a wave and helped decode Egyptian hieroglyphs.
   619pts
5. 5
   Galileo Galilei

   Astronomer, physicist and engineer who turned the telescope on the sky, studied motion and built instruments from compasses to thermoscopes.
   535pts
6. 6
   Rabindranath Tagore

   Nobel-winning poet who also composed over 2,000 songs, painted, founded a university and wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
   535pts
7. 7
   José Rizal

   Filipino ophthalmologist, novelist, sculptor and linguist whose novels helped inspire the Philippine Revolution.
   535pts
8. 8
   Benjamin Franklin

   Printer, physicist, inventor, diplomat and memoirist, with a hall-of-fame entry in chess and another in swimming.
   535pts
9. 9
   Mikhail Lomonosov

   Russian chemist, physicist, poet and grammarian who co-founded Moscow University and observed the atmosphere of Venus.
   485pts
10. 10
    Zhang Heng

    Han astronomer and poet who built the first seismoscope and an armillary sphere.
    428pts
11. 11
    Athanasius Kircher

    Jesuit scholar who wrote on Egyptology, geology, magnetism, music and medicine and built one of Europe's first public museums.
    428pts
12. 12
    Ibn Khaldun

    North African historian whose Muqaddimah pioneered sociology and economics while he served as a judge and diplomat.
    428pts
13. 13
    Shen Kuo

    Song dynasty statesman who described the magnetic compass, theorised how landscapes form and wrote on mathematics, medicine and music.
    428pts
14. 14
    Francis Bacon

    Lord Chancellor, essayist and philosopher who set out the inductive method of modern science in Novum Organum.
    428pts
15. 15
    Christopher Wren

    Astronomy professor and Royal Society founder who rebuilt St Paul's Cathedral and over fifty London churches after the Great Fire.
    362pts
16. 16
    John von Neumann

    Mathematician behind game theory and the stored-program computer architecture, with key work on quantum mechanics and the Manhattan Project.
    362pts
17. 17
    Ibn al-Haytham

    Arab scholar whose Book of Optics explained vision as light entering the eye and set out an early experimental method.
    362pts
18. 18
    Michelangelo

    Sculptor of David, painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, architect of the dome of St Peter's and a published poet.
    362pts
19. 19
    Eratosthenes

    Librarian of Alexandria who measured the Earth's circumference, mapped the known world, devised the prime sieve and wrote poetry.
    285pts
20. 20
    Aristotle

    Wrote the founding texts of logic, biology, ethics, poetics and physics.
    285pts
21. 21
    Al-Biruni

    Measured the Earth's radius, compared religions and wrote on astronomy, minerals and history.
    285pts
22. 22
    Leon Battista Alberti

    Renaissance architect, painter, cryptographer and writer who set out the rules of linear perspective in On Painting.
    285pts
23. 23
    Archimedes

    Mathematician, physicist and military engineer of Syracuse.
    285pts
24. 24
    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

    Co-invented calculus, designed calculating machines and wrote on law, history and theology.
    285pts
25. 25
    Isaac Newton

    Built classical mechanics and calculus, then ran the Royal Mint and chased alchemy.
    195pts
26. 26
    Ibn Sina

    Physician and philosopher whose Canon of Medicine taught Europe for six centuries.
    195pts
27. 27
    Alexander von Humboldt

    Explorer and naturalist whose work spanned botany, geology, climatology and geography, and whose Cosmos tried to describe the whole universe.
    195pts
28. 28
    Nicolaus Copernicus

    Proposed the Sun-centred universe while also working as a physician, canon lawyer and economist who described Gresham's law early.
    195pts
29. 29
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Poet and dramatist who also published on optics, botany and geology.
    0pts
30. 30
    Hildegard of Bingen

    Abbess who composed music, wrote medical texts and recorded her own visions.
    0pts
31. 31
    Blaise Pascal

    Founded probability theory, built a mechanical calculator and wrote the Pensées.
    0pts

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