# Who is history's greatest polymath?

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

*By YPB Team · Published August 11, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-historys-greatest-polymath*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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

Tags: science, legends