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Are you talking about Alan Kay as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay ? He doesn’t seem to have made any major cont
by claudius 13y ago
Are you talking about Alan Kay as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay ? He doesn’t seem to have made any major contributions to physics, mathematics, the natural sciences or basically any other field, apart from software engineering.
- gdubs 13y agoPolymath needn't mean 'makes major contributions to multiple fields' (though, of course it, it can.) It means someone has deep knowledge across a wide array of subjects, and typically draws inspiration from fields which are orthogonal to their primary field of interest. In Kay's case, it's applying the concepts of biology, genetics, mathematics, and architecture, to computer science, to create Object Oriented Programming. A major breakthrough in his primary field (computer science) came about because of a wide (rather than narrow) field of study.