Leonardo da Vinci

Before search engines or social media, there was Leonardo da Vinci—a one-man brain trust with a paintbrush, a sketchbook, and a nonstop drive to figure everything out. He wasn’t just good at one thing—he was good at everything. Painter, inventor, scientist, engineer, and writer, Leonardo showed the world what it means to be truly curious about how everything works.

His paintings, like The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are some of the most famous in the world. But what made him different was how he connected art with science. He studied the human body by dissecting cadavers, filling notebooks with detailed drawings of muscles, organs, and bones—way ahead of his time. He sketched flying machines, bridges, water systems, and war inventions that didn’t even exist yet. His notebooks are like a time capsule from the future.

Leonardo developed a painting technique called sfumato, which means 'to evaporate like smoke'. It let him blend colors and edges in a way that made faces look soft, realistic, and full of emotion. You can see it best in the Mona Lisa—no one really knows if she’s smiling or not, and that’s what makes it so powerful. In Vitruvian Man, he combined math, art, and anatomy to explore how humans fit into the world with perfect balance and symmetry.

Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t just an artist. He was a deep thinker who used his talents to explore the biggest ideas—how we move, how we feel, how we build, and how we dream. Everything he touched was driven by one thing: curiosity. And through that curiosity, he changed both art and science forever.