Robert Hooke was an English polymath who was active as a physicist, astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to investigate living things at microscopic scale in 1665, using a compound microscope that he designed. Hooke was an impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood who went on to became one of the most important scientists of his time. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke attained wealth and esteem by performing more than half of the property line surveys and assisting with the city's rapid reconstruction. Often vilified by writers in the centuries after his death, his reputation was restored at the end of the twentieth century and he has been called "England's Leonardo [da Vinci]".
c. 1680 Portrait of a Mathematician by Mary Beale, conjectured to be of Hooke but also conjectured to be of Isaac Barrow
Robert Boyle by Johann Kerseboom, at Gawthorpe Hall, Lancashire
Illustration from The posthumous works of Robert Hooke... published in Acta Eruditorum, 1707
Hooke noted the shadows (a and b) cast by both the globe and the rings on each other in this drawing of Saturn
A polymath is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.
Benjamin Franklin is one of the foremost polymaths in history. Franklin was a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer and political philosopher. He further attained a legacy as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
The Developmental Model of Polymathy (DMP)