If we elect to pursue graduate study, we will only work to narrow our focus of study even further.
Polymath def professional#
Our culture and society do not know quite what to do with combinations like that, nor do our professional and employment structures allow for easy ways to become experts in two completely different fields. It is a very rare thing to encounter the student who simultaneously pursues political history and astrophysics.
political science and economics or religion and Arabic), which make them complementary of each other. A few may choose two areas of study, though they are often linked in some way (e.g. (However, even secondary schools are softening required curricula in favor of more electives in some places.) By the time we enter the world of higher education, we are expected to choose a major area of study and pursue that with increasing specificity. Often our primary and secondary educations have the appearance of being more complete with required studies in language, science, mathematics, literature, history and other areas. Instead it seems from childhood we are continually honed and refined toward doing “something.” We aren’t really told that we can (or should) do many things, but that we should build our skills in order to be an expert, or a specialist in something. Polymaths such as Djerassi would seem to be a dying breed in the twenty-first century at least our culture does not celebrate or note them in quite the same way as perhaps we once did. You have a deep connection with each person 1 And in the ideal polygamy I suspect there’s no number one wife and no number six wife. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important.
To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity. I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers – are dabblers in many different areas. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it.
Polymath def tv#
Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director, and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leonardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. But even his critics would admit that he really is more than “a scientist who writes.” I enjoy Djerassi’s writing, though not everyone will. Sitting down with the book the next day, I found it sharp, funny, mannered, and dazzlingly erudite – sometimes, like a bumptious student, too erudite for its own good. At a reading in the Austrian Cultural Forum in London this summer, complete with Schönberg’s songs and four actors, including Djerassi himself, it drew a good crowd and bewitched them for an hour and a half. In itself, the book is an exercise in polymathy.
Polymath def series#
His latest book, Four Jews on Parnassus, is an imagined series of debates between Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schönberg, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, which touches on art, music, philosophy, and Jewish identity. As a chemist (synthesizing cortisone and helping invent the Pill) an art collector (he assembled one of the world’s largest collections of works by Paul Klee) and an author (19 books and plays), he has accomplished more than enough for one lifetime. But Djerassi also passes a sterner test: he can do a lot, too. Strictly speaking, that means he is someone who knows a lot about a lot. Barth, in Convergence of Libraries and Technology Organizations, 2011 PolymathsĬarl Djerassi is a polymath.
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