The Polymath Foundation

The Polymath Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization. It was formed to create a new type of interdisciplinary university dedicated to the universal pursuit of knowledge and the development of students' full potential as thinkers, doers, and leaders. We believe that many students have talents that lie across multiple disciplines, and that it is possible to fully develop all of these talents in the standard frame of a university curriculum by blending disciplinary instruction with courses that draw parallels between ideas from different disciplines. Furthermore, we believe that we can provoke the development of self-determined values and self-actualization required for moral leadership by allowing students to explore many different subjects and set their own courses in a goal and problem-directed, rather than subject-specific, curriculum. On that level, our goal is to promote the pursuit of students' individual visions, training them to make full use of their talents as leaders, professionals, artists, scientists, and human beings. Because their training will focus on cross-disciplinary reasoning as well as individual fields, it will span all boundaries. In short, we will graduate polymaths. Glorious as the individual effects of such a plan are, our ultimate goal is to provoke a second Renaissance by raising a new generation of polymaths. Such training would vastly reduce the complexity of current interdisciplinary challenges, accelerating the rate of artistic, scientific, and philosophical progress. The effect would be more profound than mere expediency, however: because an unprecedented number of polymaths will be taught under our system, they will drive new problem-solving approaches into the very fabric of human inquiry, deriving elegant solutions to existing challenges while posing exciting new challenges for the next century. See our website, projectpolymath.org, for more about our vision and what steps we are taking to implement it.