Computer Scientist The 21st Century Renaissance Man

Since the Renaissance, figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, to name but a few, have played a fundamental role in the development of our civilization. So much so that those exceptional human beings are part of the collective memory of humankind, and make guest appearances in everyday conversations amongst people who normally have little or no concern for art or science. Who doesn’t know about ‘Mona Lisa’ or the famous fall of an apple, which, according to scientific lore, inspired Newton to discover the law of gravitation? Einstein, for one, stares at us from the front of T-shirts all over the globe. People like Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are often referred to as ‘Renaissance men’ or ‘polymaths’. According to a typical dictionary, a Renaissance man is a person who knows a lot about many different subjects, and has many practical skills and abilities. There is no doubt that the above-mentioned people were prototypical Renaissance men, but can a truly Renaissance man exist today? Many observers would argue that all human endeavours have become so specialized that our modern age cannot breed polymaths anymore. Our thesis in this short essay is that broadly educated computer scientists may be considered the 21st century Renaissance men. Let us state, at the outset, that we are not claiming that a well-educated computer scientist necessarily knows a lot about many different subjects outside her/his range of expertise. The kind of polymath nature that computer scientists possess is not related to a specific knowledge per se; rather it is methodological, and rests on the mental tool that computer scientists use to understand their world—be it imaginary, natural or artificial. To quote from Jeanette Wing’s paper [7],