A selection of four books, on: Thomas Young (1733-1829), Joseph Leidy (1823-1891), Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), and Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), each subtitled with the “last man who knew everything” epitaph.

“Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.”

— Athanasius Kircher (c.1670) (Ѻ)

“Spend a few thoughts sometimes on the puzzling inquiries concerning vacuums and atoms, the doctrine of infinites, indivisibles, and incommensurables in geometry, wherein there appear some insolvable difficulties: do this on purpose to give you a more sensible impression of the poverty of your understanding and the imperfection of your knowledge. This will teach you what a vain thing it is to fancy that you know all things, and will instruct you to think modestly of your present attainments.”

— Isaac Watts (1727), The Improvement of the Mind (pg. 22); read by Michael Faraday at age 14

An intellectual roundtable: Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Humboldt, Alexander Humboldt, a cited last person to know everything, and Johann Goethe, another well-cited last person to know everything, Jena 1797, discussing, in Goethe's own words, “all of nature from the perspectives of philosophy and science”. [36]

“At the beginning of this century it was possible for an Alexander von Humboldt to take a survey of the entire domain of the extant science. Such a survey would be impossible for any scientist now, even if gifted with more than Humboldt’s powers. Scarcely any specialist of today is really master of all the work which has been done in his own comparatively small field. Facts and their classification have been accumulating at such a rate, that nobody seems to have leisure to recognize the relations of subgroups to the whole. It is as if individual workers in both Europe and America were bringing their stones to one great building and piling them on cementing them together without regard to any general plan or to their individual neighbor’s work.”

(a) prevalence of citations claiming that person was the last to know everything;
(b) age of the citation, e.g. Leibniz (1914) and Young (1921);
(c) a weighting factor addition for known established IQs,

#	Person	Citations
	-----------------------------------------------
1.	Aristotle (384-322BC) IQ:195|#10	“Aristotle, described by some as the last man to know everything there was to know, wrote his classic books on rhetoric some 2300 years ago.” (1986) [30] “His combined works constitute a virtual encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. It has been said that Aristotle was probably the last person to know everything there was to be known in his own time.” (2009) [4] “Aristotle may have been the last person to know everything there was to be known in his own time.” (2009) [5]
2.	Roger Bacon (1214-1294) IQ:175|#188	“Roger Bacon—the founder of English philosophy whose knowledge of chemistry and mathematics led him to recognize the value of deductive reasoning, establish a scientific method, and invent spectacles—who has been called the last man to know everything, the last man to bridge the two cultures.” (2003) [18]
3.	Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) IQ:200|#7	“The last person to know everything was Leonardo da Vinci.” (1985) [12] “Da Vinci, the last man to know everything, was overwhelmed by waves of depression, which left him shy and insecure.” (2004) [28]
4.	Francis Bacon (1561-1626) IQ:185|#81	“Francis Bacon, they say, was the last man to know everything.” (1992) [32] “Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is regarded by historians as the last person to know everything in the world. Since then, each of us learns a progressively smaller percentage of all the information that exists.” (1998, 2004) [1]
5.	Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) IQ:180|#95	“I think someone said that Kepler was the last man to know everything. It may be that we are now redefining the 'everything' that this new man has to know; he must have just sufficient knowledge to assess the contribution of his predecessors.” (1968) [33]
6.	John Milton (1608-1674) IQ:180|#111	“Milton, some say, was the last man to know everything (or to know enough about most things to discuss them with authority).” Darwin was the last biologist who could claim that.” (2001) [29] “It is said that the 17th-century poet John Milton, although blind towards the end of his life, was the last person to know everything because he had read virtually every book ever written at that time.” (2007) [13]
7.	Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) IQ:190|#46	“By the time of the Jesuit natural philosopher Athanasius Kircher (in Joscelyn Godwin's words, the ‘last man to know everything’), the Renaissance man of knowledge had split into three mutually exclusive figures: theologian, philosopher, and scientist.” (2001) [23] Findlen, Paula. (2004). Athanasius Kircher: the Last Man Who Knew Everything. “Kircher combined polymath erudition and intellectual eccentricity in ways far beyond mortal men. He is often mentioned as a candidate for ‘the last man to know everything’, from obscure archaic languages and literatures to the latest in science to the most fantastical absurdities then in currency, all in heaps in the measureless attic of his remarkable mind. He wrote 40 books on subjects ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphics to possible causes of the bubonic plague, constructed strange objects, including an automatic organ, and assembled in Rome what was arguably the first natural history museum.” (2006) [24] Godwin, Joscelyn. (2009). Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World: the Life and Work of the Last Man to Search for Universal Knowledge. Inner Traditions. “Another candidate [for the last person to know everything] is archaeologist, mathematician, biologist, physicist, volcanologist, and Egyptologist Athanasius Kircher.” (2009) [2]
8.	Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) IQ:195|#14	“Leibnitz was the last man to know everything, and Locke confessed his ignorance.” (1914) [22] “Leibnitz, it has been said, was the last man to know everything. Thought this is most certainly a gross exaggeration, it is an epigram with considerable point. For it is true that up to the last years of the eighteenth century our greatest mentors were able not only to compass the whole science of their day, perhaps together with mastery of several languages, but to absorb a broad culture as well. But as the fruits of scientific labor have increasingly been applied to our material betterment, fields of specialized interest have come to be cultivated, and the activities of an ever-increasing body of scientific workers have diverged. Today we are most of us content to carry out an intense cultivation of our own little scientific garden (to continue the metaphor), deriving occasional pleasure from chat with our neighbors over the fence, while with them we discuss, criticize, and exhibit our produce.” (1957, 2001, 2005) [17] “Leibnitz, it has been said, was probably the last man to know everything.” (1969, 1971, 1973) [15] “Leibniz is said to be the last person to know everything.” (1976) [11] “Leibniz had a huge range of theoretical as well as practical interests. Philosopher, mathematician, historian, logician, political writer, and counselor to statesmen and aristocrats: he was a ‘universal genius’ (Kneale, 1962), the ‘last man to know everything’ (Bugarski, 1976).” (2004) [25]
9.	Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) IQ:185|#80	“Emanuel Swedenborg probably was the last person to know everything in the world. He wrote 155 books in 17 sciences (before age 54): mastering astronomy, engineering, chemistry, mathematics, geology, paleontology, anatomy, physiology, optics, metallurgy, cosmogony, cosmology, and psychology; after which he wrote an additional 282 books [on religion] in the remaining 32 years, some being substantial tomes of more than 1,000 pages.” [6]
10.	Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) IQ:185|#88	“Kant was the last man to know everything worth knowing in the humanities and sciences of his age, thought he was not quite caught up in the most recent advances in mathematics.” (2003) [26]
11.	Johann Goethe (1749-1832) IQ:225|#1	“Goethe, he used to say, was the last man in the world who knew everything; after Goethe (d. 1832), there was too much to know for any one person to know it all.” (c.1966) [10] “It was said of Goethe, after his death in 1932, that he was the last man to know everything worth knowing.” (1982, 1985, 1990) [14] “It has been said that the last person to know everything was Goethe. Can’t vouch for that, but there has been such an explosion of knowledge, industry, technology, and techniques since his life that this statement sounds about right.” — Carlton Smith (2014), The Ignorant Grandfather (Ѻ)
12.	Thomas Young (1773-1829)	“Thomas Young, one of the great lights of British medicine, and science, and as someone as said, the last man to know everything.” (1921) [21] “Young as been called the last man to know everything. This obviously over-simplified statement is to be taken to mean that during the nineteenth century the world of learning rapidly was becoming much too broad for any polymath to master more than a fragment of it.” (1959) [31] Robinson, Andrew. (2006). The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the anonymous Polymath who proved Newton wrong, Explained how we see, Cured the sick, and deciphered the Rosetta stone, among other feats of Genius. OneWorld. “It has been suggested that physicist, physician, and Egyptologist Thomas Young was the last person to know everything.” (2009) [2]
13.	Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859) IQ:185|#83	Hjelmroos-Koski, Mervi. (2009). “Baron Alexander von Humboldt: the Last Man Who Knew Everything.” May 19, Blog of the Botanical Art and Illustration Program at Denver Botanical Gardens.
14.	John Mill (1806-1873) IQ:185|#73	“John Stuart Mill, the British economist, political thinker, and philosopher of science, died more than a hundred years ago. The year of his death (1873) is important because he is reputed to have been the last man to know everything there was to know in the world.” (1998, 2007) [20] “John Stuart Mill has been described as the last man to know everything.” (2000) [16] “British economist, political thinker, and philosopher of science John Stuart Mill was reputed to have been the last man to know everything there was to know.” (2006) [19]
15.	Joseph Leidy (1823-1891) IQ:150|#454	Warren, Leonard. (1998). Joseph Leidy: the Last Man Who Knew Everything. Yale University Press.
16.	Henri Poincare (1854-1912) IQ:190|#45	“A mathematician I know once described Poincare as the last man to know everything.” (2006) [27]
17.	Max Weber (1864-1920) IQ:170|#251	“Weber seems to me very much a man of a particular time. A man of whom it has been said (as it has of others) that he was the last person to know everything of importance that was to be known. A nonsensical idea, of course, but one which point to the extraordinary breadth of his interests in sociology, religion, economics, politics, history, music, and much else besides.” (2005) [3]
18.	Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) IQ:155|#455	“He became known as ‘the last man who knew everything’.” (1999) [8]

“You will see it written that Hadamard was the last of the universal mathematicians—the last, that is, to encompass the whole of the subject, before it became so large that this was impossible. However, you will also see this said of Hilbert, Poincare, Klein, and perhaps of one or two other mathematicians of the period. I don't know to whom the title most properly belongs, though I suspect the answer is actually Gauss.”

“To seem to ‘know all things’ certainly, and to speak positively of them, is a trick of bold and young fellows; whereas those, that are indeed intelligent and considerate, are wont to employ more wary and diffident expressions as he speaks.”

— Aristotle (c.350), Publication; cited by Robert Boyle (1662) in New Experiments Physico-Mechanical on the Spring of the Air (pg. 2); in: Collected Works, Volume One (Ѻ)

“Spend a few thoughts sometimes on the puzzling inquiries concerning vacuums and atoms, the doctrine of infinites, indivisibles, and incommensurables in geometry, wherein there appear some insolvable difficulties: do this on purpose to give you a more sensible impression of the poverty of your understanding and the imperfection of your knowledge. This will teach you what a vain thing it is to fancy that you know all things, and will instruct you to think modestly of your present attainments.”

— Isaac Watts (1727), The Improvement of the Mind (pg. 22); read by Michael Faraday at age 14 [40]

“If this universe is one universe, if it is so far thinkable that you can pass in reason from one part of it to another, it does not matter very much what that fact is. For every fact leads to every other by the path of the air. Only men do not yet see how, always. And your business as thinkers is to make plainer the way from some thing to the whole of things; to show the rational connection between your fact and the frame of the universe. If your subject is law, the roads are plain to anthropology, the science of man, to political economy, the theory of legislation, ethics, and thus by several paths to your final view of life. It would be equally true of any subject. The only difference is in the ease of seeing the way. To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus, to know anything — you must know all.”

— Oliver Holmes Jr. (1886), “The Profession of the Law” [38]

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

— Isaac Asimov (c.1960) [37]

“Ideas about order and disorder began to germinate in my mind about the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Their origin was in the areas of physics and chemistry—the Carnot cycle, of course, as well as my wanderings through the labyrinth of chemical thermodynamics. It was about this time that the laws and principles of thermodynamics began to be applied on an increasing scale to the geological and biological sciences. The conviction grew that energy and entropy relationships were fundamental not only in understanding processes in physics and chemistry but also in astronomy, geology, and biology. Inevitably this led to the conjecture that further extrapolation would lead to the human sciences and arts, and even to psychology, sociology, history, music, philosophy and religion. Someone, I thought, will bring out the importance of understanding the concepts of order and disorder to all configurations of matter—including man and all of his works. Individuals have applied these concepts within their own specialties; there are articles on information and electronics, entropy in literature, music, and even entropy in religion. But I have waited in vain for someone to show that order and disorder are universal. Most of this essay, and it is an essay—an attempt—was written in the early 1960s. But I am, I believe, a cautious person. I ask myself, who am I [four degrees: BS geology MIT; MA Columbia; MA and PhD metallurgical engineering, Stanford] to presume myself enough of an eclectic to be able to discuss all of human knowledge [see: last person to know everything]?”

— Norman Dolloff (1975), Preface to Heat Death and the Universe (see: polymathy degree problem)