A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much") is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. The term was first used in the seventeenth century but the related term, polyhistor, is an ancient term with similar meaning.The term is often used to describe those great thinkers of the Renaissance and the Golden Age of Islam, each of whom excelled at several fields in science and the arts, including such individuals as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Paolo Sarpi, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Michael Servetus, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, and Omar Khayyám. These thinkers embodied a notion that emerged in Renaissance Italy, expressed by one of its most accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), that "a man can do all things if he will." Embodying a basic tenet of Renaissance humanism that humans are empowered and limitless in their capacity for development, the concept led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible.The term applies to the gifted people of the Renaissance who sought to develop their abilities in all areas of knowledge as well as in physical development, social accomplishments, and the arts, in contrast to the vast majority of people of that age who were not well educated. This term entered the lexicon during the twentieth century and has now been applied to great thinkers living before and after the Renaissance.
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