Alberti – The Virtues of a Renaissance Man

Florence’s festive culture was spiced by the ability to inspire those with creative minds to combine ideas from disparate disciplines. In narrow streets, cloth dyers worked next to goldbeaters next to lens crafters, and during their breaks they went to the piazza to engage in animated discussions. At the Pollaiuolo workshop, anatomy was being studi

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Pacioli and Leonardo bonded over their shared fondness for such stimulating amusements and entertainments. Leonardo’s name crops up often in Pacioli’s notes. After writing the basics of one trick, for instance, Pacioli declares, “Well Leonardo, you can do more of this on your own.”8 More seriously, Leonardo learned math from Pacioli, a great tutor,

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In most of his studies of nature, Leonardo theorized by making analogies. His quest for knowledge across all the disciplines of arts and sciences helped him see patterns. Occasionally this mode of thinking misled him, and it sometimes substituted for reaching more profound scientific theories. But this cross-disciplinary thinking and pattern-seekin

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Albert Einstein, when he was stymied in his pursuit of his theory of relativity, would pull out his violin and play Mozart, which helped him reconnect with the harmonies of the cosmos. Ada Lovelace, whom I profiled in a book on innovators, combined the poetic sensibility of her father, Lord Byron, with her mother’s love of the beauty of math to env

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