On: Is it possible to be a polymath these days?

Hasn't the amount of knowledge in math, science, and engineering been growing exponentially whereas our capability to learn and teach is still mostly linear?

Edit: Should also mention Malcolm Gladwell's recent book which posits that it takes on the order of 10000 hours to become an "expert" at something.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell...

Argh... it's not Gladwell's book that posits the 10000 hours bit -- it's from Ericsson's research!

Gladwell is so popular now that we'd better get used to this. Gladwell himself has lamented the phenomenon, but there's no stopping it, I fear.

I think our capacity has expanded also. Not nearly quickly enough, but we can learn more now than we ever did before (or at the very least, we can cut out a lot of the noise in our learning experience).

Also, at least in math, while there is certainly more content than one can learn in a lifetime, with more content being created every day at an increasing rate, many different abstractions have been developed and clever analogies applied in order to simplify new learning.