… of history, nor am I a fan-boy of celebrities, current or past. But I AM an admirer of people who are (for lack of a better term) broadly talented and effective.

That is, learning about such people is kind of a sub-hobby of mine. I look up to, read biographies of, and am inspired by people like:

Galton, ca. 1850

Francis Galton (who came up with the idea of statistical correlation; first wrote about “nature vs. nurture”, invented the idea of psychometrics; did important work in meteorology and audiology, inventing the Galton whistle and a few other things)

Alberti, ca. 1440

Or the classic example of such folks, Leonardo da Vinci (painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, scientist, writer…)

Or consider Leon Battista Alberti (architect, painter, poet, mathematician, horseman, author, artist, priest, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer, and archer)


I’d include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (novelist, poet, statesman, theatre director, natural philosopher, mineralogist)

And Alexander von Humboldt (Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, romantic philosophy, quantitative botanical geography)

Along with Daniel Bernoulli (math, physics, probability theory, medicine, anatomy, botany)

A worried looking Goethe, ca. 1828

And our old friend, Peter Simon Pallas (zoologist, professor, surgeon, botanist, explorer) — who also gave his name to the Pallas Cat (LINK to an earlier SRS page about this) and Pallasite.

Pallas, ca. 1906

1. Can you find more people like those above? They must be skilled in multiple arts / sciences / domains-of-expertise AND have left a record so we can tell what they were so good at doing. And just as importantly, HOW can you do a SearchReSearch strategy to identify these folks?