The eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Young was reputedly the last person alive to have read every book ever published in his day. Young belongs to a host of famous historical thinkers – Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton – who each made major contributions to a wide variety of academic fields. This brand of Renaissance man seems noticeably absent in today’s intellectual landscape. Where have they all gone?

There is one obvious reason why nobody has since achieved Young’s great feat; the wealth of printed knowledge has grown several thousand-fold since his day. The comedian Stewart Lee once joked that a modern-day Young would have to read not only all the literary, theological and scientific works past and present, but also every single celebrity hardback – including those by Jeremy Clarkson and Chris Moyles. As a result, he would end up more stupid than a man who had read nothing.

This increase in things known has led inevitably to an increased division of academic labour. One cannot hope to contribute anything until having gone through three years of university education. If a young British person takes A-Levels they have probably already narrowed their academic horizons to just three subjects, with most university courses making them narrower still. By the time university students are sufficiently primed to participate in one discipline, opportunities to take on another are slim. The pressures of academic life, departmental politics and the changing tides of intellectual fashion entrench disciplinary closed-mindedness. All this means that genuine polymathia is now generally impracticable.

In many ways, this is probably a good thing; after all, no one wants to be a jack of all trades, master of none. But one can’t help but wonder whether the secret to the polymaths’ success lay in their ability to make connections across disciplines. Da Vinci’s knack for invention may have been fed by his detailed investigations of human anatomy, while Galileo’s dual passion for mathematics and astronomy led him to study the heavenly bodies in a systematic rather than merely descriptive way. How can we create such interdisciplinary cross-pollination in contemporary, specialised education?

Even if individuals cannot get a foothold in multiple fields, the fruits of interdisciplinary fertilisation can still blossom. As students, we can simply engage with friends studying different courses – even inviting each other to attend favourite lectures.

Furthermore, we have never had so much knowledge available at our fingertips with which to educate ourselves outside of institutional boundaries. There is enough online material to learn virtually anything – virtually! Accessible, academic titles for the general reader grace the shelves of every good bookshop and e-book store. And in contemporary academia more broadly, interdisciplinary research centres are being set up within universities left, right and centre; here in Cambridge, CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) is a case in point

As well as enabling that serendipitous, creative transfer of ideas that may have given a Da Vinci or Galileo their ‘eureka’ moment, such interdisciplinary collaboration has a greater importance. Solutions to the challenges of our century – climate change, economic crisis, an ageing population – will require expertise spanning many disciplines. Fostering a culture for collaboration will thus be key in years to come. There may be no polymaths any more, but we needn’t regret their demise; perhaps their place can be taken by newfound collaboration between the disciplines. And all this without anyone having to read even one word of Jeremy Clarkson’s The World According to Jeremy Clarkson: Volume Three.