ABSTRACT
A colleague of ours was talking with a dear friend, a very bright guy who prided himself as something of a polymath, when the latter declared, with evident pride in the chestnut he was about to impart, that Aristotle was the last living person to know all there was to know. Not long after, our friend was reading a work by Czech author Milan Kundera, where she encountered the claim that the French encyclopedist, Denis Diderot, was the last person alive who knew everything. Intrigued, she submitted the evidently controversial issue to a search on Google. Although she surveyed only the first 20 or so of the more than 8.5 million hits, she quickly found that there were several other contenders for the crown (e.g., Milton, Jefferson).
