Anyone who reads my weekly column knows my preference for writing about polymaths, persons whose brilliance, inventiveness and dedication have enriched our lives.

 As such, I was pleased to learn that a new book, entitled "Polymath: Master Multiple Disciplines, Learn New Skills, Think Flexibly, and Become Extraordinary Autodidact" had been published in the United Kingdom.  The author is Peter Hollins.  I found his email address and wrote to him together with a copy of my column on the two smartest men who have lived in the last 400 or 500 years.  They were Thomas Young and Leonhard Euler. 

Surprisingly, Mr. Hollins wrote back thanking me while disagreeing with my choices.  His were Leonardo DaVinci,  Gottfried  Wilhelm Leibnitz and Alexander von Humboldt.  I was acquainted with the latter but obviously not enough to rank him so very high.  Therefore, I did some research and found that he was a noted explorer, naturalist, all-around genius and a lost hero of science although world-famous in his time. He led one of the first major scientific expeditions into the South American rain forest and another into the wilds of Siberia. Carrying fragile instruments, he navigated perilous rapids and climbed the volcano of Tenerife. He observed animals, plants, and cultures that no one in Europe had ever dreamed of, and his books about them inspired a whole generation of scientists — including Charles Darwin.

According to Andrea Wulf, in her book "The Invention of Nature," Humboldt was one of the most captivating and inspiring men of his time. He was as well known as Napoleon. Born in 1769 into a wealthy Prussian aristocratic family, he discarded a life of privilege to discover for himself how the world worked. As a young man he set out on a five-year exploration to Latin America, risking his life many times and returning with a new sense of the world. It was a journey that shaped his life and thinking, and that made him legendary across the globe. He lived in cities such as Paris and Berlin, but was equally at home on the most remote branches of the Orinoco River or in the Kazakh Steppe at Russia’s Mongolian border. During much of his long life, he was the nexus of the scientific world, writing some 50,000 letters and receiving at least double that number. Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody. He was also a man of contradictions. He was a fierce critic of colonialism and supported the revolutions in Latin America, yet was chamberlain to two Prussian kings. He admired the United States for their concepts of liberty and equality but never stopped criticizing their failure to abolish slavery. He called himself ‘half an American.

Humboldt’s books were published in a dozen languages and were so popular that people bribed booksellers to be the first to receive copies, yet he died a poor man. He could be vain, but would also give his last money to a struggling young scientist. He packed his life with travels and incessant work. He always wanted to experience something new and, as he said, ideally, ‘three things at the same time’. Humboldt was unlike anybody else because he was able to remember even the smallest details for years: the shape of a leaf, the color of soil, a temperature reading, the layering of a rock. This extraordinary memory allowed him to compare the observations he had made all over the world several decades or thousands of miles apart.  He even proved that Amerigo Vespucci had no part in naming of the new continent, but that the name America originated in a hidden spot of the Vosges Mountains of France.

In the wake of his famous expedition through the Spanish colonies in the spring of 1804, Humboldt visited the United States, where he met several times with then-president Jefferson. A warm and fruitful friendship resulted, and the two men corresponded a good deal over the years, speculating together on topics of mutual interest, including natural history, geography, and the formation of an international scientific network. Living in revolutionary societies, both were deeply concerned with the human condition, and each vested hope in the new American nation as a possible answer to many of the deficiencies characterizing European societies at the time.

The intellectual exchange between the two over the next twenty-one years touched on the pivotal events of those times, such as the independence movement in Latin America and the applicability of the democratic model to that region, the relationship between America and Europe, and the latest developments in scientific research and various technological projects.

Final thoughts

Humboldt’s scores of books, diaries and letters reveal a visionary, a thinker far ahead of his time. He invented isotherms – the lines of temperature and pressure that we see on today’s weather maps – and he also discovered the magnetic equator.

Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry.  His new book “Science Snippets” is available from Amazon and other book sellers. It contains a number of previously published columns.  He can be reached by email at  [email protected].