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"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
- Niels Bohr, physicist and Nobel laureate.
Historically, polymaths have played essential roles in shaping human knowledge and progress.
The most famous polymaths have contributed to fields different from science to art to politics.
This is a list of the most essential polymaths and what they did for the world.
Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance man, might be the most famous polymath ever.
Born in 1452 near Vinci, Italy. Da Vinci revolutionized art, science, and engineering.
He's probably best known for painting the "Mona Lisa, " but he was also involved in dissecting human corpses and designing flying machines centuries before their time.
He was even the first to develop an early form of robot with the conception of a mechanical knight in 1495.
He even conceptualized a mechanical knight - essentially an early robot - in 1495.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer and physicist.
He helped us understand the cosmos and laid the foundation for modern-day astronomy.
It was challenging for Galileo. He faced many years of persecution from the Catholic Church for his out-of-the-box views. He was even imprisoned for daring to say the Earth rotates around the sun.
Sadly, he went blind later in life and had to continue his work through dictation.
Isaac Newton was an eccentric born in 1643 in Woolsthorpe, England.
Newton is best known for devising the laws of motion to help us understand how gravitation works. You might remember the famous story of the apple falling on his head, which gave him insight.
Newton also independently invented calculus all on his own.
He wasn't without some weird views, as he harbored a secret obsession with alchemy and spent years looking for the philosopher's stone. He would have fit right in the Harry Potter book series.
Benjamin Franklin was the famous founding father who flew a kite in a thunderstorm to prove lightning was electricity.
He invented many things, including the bifocal glasses at age 78.
He suggested daylight saving time as a joke in a satirical essay.
Franklin created America's first political cartoon, established the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia, and was America's first diplomat to France.
Albert Einstein was a brilliant physicist who helped us understand the universe.
He most famously came up with the theory of relativity.
He was not only a scientific genius but also a quirky individual. He refused to wear socks and once said, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"
Einstein's brain was later stolen after his death by the pathologist who performed his autopsy. The brain was kept in a jar for decades before it was recovered.
Nikola Tesla was an eccentric genius who revolutionized electricity. Coming up with the AC system and envisioned wireless communication before anything else.
Tesla said he received signals from Mars, which he took so seriously that he designed a "death beam" capable of downing aliens.
He had even more quirky ideas with the creation of an "earthquake machine" and his obsession with the number three - where he would walk around the building three times before entering.
With so many ideas, Tesla made little money. He died penniless in a New York hotel room.
Archimedes, born in 287 BCE in Syracuse, was a polymath of the ancient world.
He's remembered for many inventions, including the compound pulley and a claw-like device for sinking enemy ships.
He's most famous for his "Eureka!" moment in the bathtub that led to groundbreaking insights on buoyancy.
Archimedes supposedly used giant mirrors to concentrate sunlight and set Roman ships on fire during the Siege of Syracuse. Though this has never been verified.
René Descartes was a French polymath of the 17th century who developed brilliant concepts in philosophy and mathematics.
He's most famous for his literary works, such as "Cogito, ergo sum," which laid the foundations for analytic geometry.
Descartes reportedly designed a lifelike automaton of his deceased daughter Francine and traveled with it in a trunk.
Descartes passed away unusually in 1650 when he died of pneumonia. He was forced to give 5 AM philosophy lessons to Queen Christina of Sweden in her freezing castle.
In 1791, Michael Faraday was born to a poor blacksmith. He rose from bookbinder's apprentice to one of history's most influential scientists.
He was self-taught and had almost no formal education.
Faraday's groundbreaking discoveries in electromagnetism revolutionized science and led to his mental breakdown. Prolonged exposure to mercury vapors during his experiments caused severe memory loss. He ended with major depressive episodes later in life.
Charles Darwin came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection despite being sick all the time, which led him to vomit daily.
He's most known for his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. On the journey, Darwin collected animal specimens and ate many of the animals he discovered. He dined on giant tortoises, armadillos, and even a puma.
The puma, he claimed, was "better meat" than beef.
Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician born in the early 1900s. Known for coming up with number theory and combinatorics while living a nomadic lifestyle.
His theories spawned the "Erdős numbers" concept to measure collaborative distance in academia.
He wrote over 1,500 papers fueled by amphetamines and an obsession with mathematical beauty.
Émilie du Châtelet was the 18th-century polymath who defied societal norms.
She translated Newton's "Principia Mathematica" while pregnant at 42. Engaged in a passionate love affair with Voltaire.
Her brilliant mind led her to make groundbreaking contributions to energy conservation.
She had to deal with the complexities of being a woman in a male-dominated field. She wore men's clothing to gain access to scientific gatherings.
Born into slavery in 1864, George Washington Carver became a renowned agricultural scientist in farming history.
You probably know him as the guy who invented peanut butter. However, he developed over 300 products from peanuts and introduced crop rotation techniques that saved countless farms from financial ruin.
Carver was also the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree.
He would invent a mobile classroom called the "Jesup wagon" to educate farmers.
Leonhard Euler of Basel, Switzerland, was a mathematical prodigy in the 1700s.
He was a polymath with contributions in multiple fields.
He solved the famous Königsberg bridge problem and developed the Euler-Lagrange equation.
Euler produced a staggering volume of work despite going blind later on. After losing the ability to see, he dictated complex mathematical treatises to his assistants. He performed complex calculations entirely in his head.
Ada Lovelace was a woman and polymath born in 1815 in London. She is known as the "godmother" of computing.
She was a mathematical prodigy and the world's first computer programmer.
Lovelace envisioned machines composing music and manipulating symbols before computers even existed.
She collaborated with another smart guy, Charles Babbage, writing the first algorithm for his Analytical Engine.
Gregor Mendel was a monk who cracked the code of heredity. He is known as the father of genetics.
He obsessively counted and cross-breeding over 28,000 pea plants in his monastery garden for eight years.
His work was largely ignored during his lifetime but was rediscovered decades after his death; he helped us understand the science of inheritance and genetics.
In the future, scientists would use his insights to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits and clone sheep.
Francis Bacon, the Renaissance polymath, was a philosopher, scientist, and a high-ranking politician.
Bacon conducted bizarre experiments, including stuffing a chicken with snow to study food preservation. This experiment may have contributed to his death when he caught pneumonia while attempting to freeze a chicken in the winter.
He later served as the Lord Chancellor of England before being convicted of bribery and briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London.
Maria Montessori was a Nobel Peace Prize educator from Italy in the late 1800s.
She created a child-centered learning method that is still used worldwide today.
Montessori developed her famous educational approach while working with mentally disabled children. She learned that proving that with the right environment and tools, these children could outperform "normal" kids in academic tests.
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American polymath of the early 1900s and the founding father of computer science.
He most famously came up with game theory.
Von Neumann also had a photographic memory that allowed him to recite entire books verbatim years after reading them.
He had a penchant for reckless driving and wild parties. He liked working on complex mathematical problems while attending rowdy social events. He was known to solve differential equations in his head while speeding.
Hermann Hesse was a visionary German novelist, poet, and pacifist of the 19th century.
His works explore the depths of human consciousness and spirituality.
Hesse claimed to have had a mystical encounter with a talking tree during an intense personal crisis. This event inspired him to write his seminal novel "Steppenwolf" - a surreal exploration of the fractured psyche.
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