We filed Form 1023 on July 16, 2008. A response from the IRS will likely take several months, during which we will prepare our fundraising and marketing campaigns.
We filed the last of our state paperwork on May 28, 2008. We have just one filing (IRS Form 1023) remaining before we can begin.
The first board meeting was held on April 25, 2008. Bylaws were drafted shortly thereafter.
The Polymath Foundation was incorporated on March 20, 2008.
The Polymath Foundation's trade name was registered on December 26, 2007.
Our new website is open to the public as of December 24, 2007!
Project Polymath is a long-term effort to create a new type of university founded upon the principle that it is both possible and desirable to simultaneously acquire breadth and depth of knowledge in time comparable to that required to obtain a traditional single-subject university degree. This is accomplished by the combination of a highly customizable and modular multidisciplinary curriculum with special courses and seminars designed to promote creativity and analogical thinking while fusing information from diverse subjects. Rather than studying individual majors, students focus on problems and concentrate on their primary approaches to these problems. The flexible nature of the curriculum gives students ample time to explore many fields without setting back their graduation, and they are encouraged to do so in order to make choices and realize control of their own destinies, maximizing personal growth and promoting self-actualization. Progress is made according to a set of independent milestones, rather than a fixed number of credits, ensuring that graduates are adequately trained not only for the challenges that lie ahead of them in their careers, but also to know and have the capability to pursue their own visions. The resulting training prepares students as individuals 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.
As glorious as the individual effects of such a plan are, our ultimate goal is to promote a second Renaissance by raising a new generation of polymaths, or “Renaissance Men”. Such training would vastly reduce the complexity of current interdisciplinary research challenges, accelerating the rate of artistic, scientific, and philosophical progress. The effect would be more profound than mere expediency, however: in the past, very few polymaths existed because they were all autodidacts. However, because an unprecedented number of polymaths will be taught under our system, they will drive new problem-solving approaches based on interdisciplinary fusion into the very fabric of human inquiry, deriving elegant solutions to existing challenges while posing exciting new challenges for the next century.
This is our vision. You can help us make it a reality. Feel free to explore our site and comment or contribute to our ideas. If you'd prefer a more straightforward explanation, visit our simply put page for a summary of the ideas that the rest of the site explains in more depth.
