Where Have All The Polymaths Gone?

In last month’s blog post, I made mention in a footnote of The Bacon Brothers, and that got me thinking about another “brothers band”, The Montgolfier Brothers.* While not actual brothers, they did name their band after real-life brothers from the 18th century – Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, sometimes known as “The Balloon Brothers”.  More than 100 years before another brotherly duo, the Wright brothers, were to make their first flight, the Montgolfier brothers were already flying. The year was 1783, and their first balloon flight was a spectacular success, with no less a spectator than the King of France looking on in wonderment.** 

Of course, there were even earlier attempts at designing a flying machine – the person who most comes to mind is none other than Leonardo da Vinci.  

Leonardo is often regarded as the prototypical polymath.*** We often weigh our pursuit of knowledge and expertise along a balance of breadth versus depth, as if they were inversely related. A polymath reminds us that this view is mistaken. A polymath shows us that diversity of knowledge can bring greater expertise - a broader breadth can lead to a deeper level of knowledge.

Let me share with you a personal anecdote. Years ago, my wife and I signed up for ballroom dancing lessons.  At our very first class, after watching us attempt the tango, the instructor pointedly asked me “you wouldn’t happen to be an actuary, would you?” Now I was pretty sure that I did not disclose my profession when we signed up for the classes. So how did she know?****  There was something in the way I moved, the angles seemed overly calibrated, she said. While perhaps not an obvious compliment (some might say far from it!), this sparked a realization in me that math and dance can be partners.

Sports and music are other examples that pair well with math. Of course, you are not calculating while you take the jump shot or play an impossibly fast moto perpetuo. Yet, the math is there. And it works the other way too – just think of how real-world phenomena and activity are essential to the development of mathematics. Perhaps one of the best examples is the Fibonacci sequence; and related to music, think of eigenvectors, harmonics, sine waves, and even string theory. 

As consulting actuaries, we already are polymaths in a way. To start with, we got the “math” part covered! And our consulting work requires us to think broadly, to come up with creative solutions.

I think it may be time to push a bit more of this polymath perspective; to use a wider and deeper frame of reference in helping us face the challenges that lay ahead, to innovate in a changing economy and navigate an ever-evolving technology.

So the next time someone looks at you oddly for learning something seemingly obscure or exploring a new topic, just smile and remember that you are following in the great path of polymaths.

*Though no longer active, their penultimate track “Between Two Points” from their 1999 debut album Seventeen Stars has recently garnered attention (25 years later!) through a cover of the song by David Gilmour (with vocals and harp by his daughter Romany Gilmour), released as a single in June 2024 (and featured in this month’s recommended soundtrack; see if you can figure out the connection of the other two songs in the soundtrack to this month’s blog).

**The entire history of the earliest attempts at flight makes for a fascinating read.  Even better, there are several museums with exhibits dedicated to early flight.  One that I visited recently, The Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas has a permanent exhibit documenting the history of the Montgolfier brothers and those very first flights. In fact, it was from this very museum’s airfield that I witnessed the great solar eclipse of 2024.  See my blog post “The Actuary, the Astronomer, and the Meteorologist” where I write about that literally awesome experience. Also see the postscript below.

***A polymath (sometimes also referred to as a “Renaissance man”) is “someone who knows a lot about many different things” (online Britannica Dictionary) or “an individual whose knowledge spans many different subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems” (Wikipedia).  But a polymath is a lot more than that – it is someone with a deep passion and an insatiable curiosity to understand the world, who explores and discovers, creates and invents, seamlessly applying one discipline to another (my definition).  And rather than being just a “jack of all trades”, a polymath is actually more a “master of all”.  For a recent biography on da Vinci, see Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci, published by Simon & Schuster in 2017.

****This turned out to not be as unbelievable as it may have at first seemed, once we found out that the instructor was married to an actuary!  In my defense, the tango is indeed a challenging dance requiring one to master multiple complex figures.  See the mesmerizing tango performance by Al Pacino and Gabrielle Anwar in the 1992 film Scent of Woman.