stewamax wrote:He was obviously a very bright chap with a Cambridge maths PhD, wide interests and was a fine lecturer and presenter to camera.
I remember one comment that I think is from The Ascent of Man on a discussion he had with John von Neumann about some topic that had a mathematical interpretation. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall listening to these two polymaths, since von Neumann himself was phenomenally gifted and had probably the widest mathematical understanding of anyone of his era.
It raises the obvious question: where are today's polymaths?
They are hiding within universities around the world I imagine. Fashions for them, like everything else, come and go. In the Ascent of Man, Bronowski writes of von Neumann and Game Theory. Funnily enough, in the same chapter he says 'And I am infinitely saddened to find myself in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into - what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely informed questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery.'
I think these comments could apply to today's world just as well as in Bronowski's time, now 50 years ago.
Dod