WHO IS A POLYMATH?

Polymaths need to bridge that gap between the invisible and the tangible. After all, "zero" used to be invisible before Brahmagupta made it tangible.

Polymaths in Western Antiquity

Ancient Roman-Greek ethicist Plutarch (46-119 CE) uses the word "polymatheia" for the first time in Quaestiones Convivales (1) to describe a sister-goddess of Delphi's Polymnia, the [divine] "faculty of the soul which inclines to attain and keep knowledge." Polymnia was the muse of eloquent speech which included rhetoric, the art of impressing minds with flawless arguments.

Plutarch was an intellectual and a priest, a mystic, someone for whom the intangible matters. So, the experience of polymathy related to divinity or the quest for divinity back then.

Etymologically, "polymath" means much knowledge/many wisdoms, a peak experience in existence.

Only a millennium later does "polymath" reappear in European literature as a concept of transdisciplinary curiosity serving intellectual performance with von Wowern, the author of De Polymathia Tractatio (1603), a German intellectual of "inconceivable vanity" (2) who was also suspected of plagiarism.