Renaissance prince
, and — besides much else — life insurance actuary, Thomas Young (1773-1829) has been called “the last man who knew everything”. At the bicentenary of his birth, the Science Museum suggested Young “probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history”. Posterity, however, has better remembered the specialists. Two centuries on, combining Young’s breadth and depth has become impossible. Even polymaths have not the hours in the day to know it all. The ideal of the Universal Man is
