Leonardo’s Presence in Modern-Day Society

It is three o’clock in the afternoon and a young boy decides to take his usual route home from school. As he is walking down the street, one of his classmates speeds by on a brand new bicycle. Right after that, the young boy hears a loud noise above him and as he looks up, he sees a helicopter racing by. A few minutes later, his older sister pulls up in her new car and offers him a ride. When they get home and pull into the driveway, they notice an airplane in the distance, along with a few skydivers who had their parachutes drawn. To the boy, these things are normal to him and his suburban neighborhood. The existence of bicycles, cars, helicopters, airplanes, and parachutes are common in his everyday life, just as they are in most other parts of the world. However ordinary these items are, most people don’t know that one man, who lived hundreds of years ago, is responsible for designing them all. Could one man, who lived hundreds of years ago, possibly been smart enough to design all of these complicated machines? Most people would probably be doubtful that he did. But I think that’s only because they’ve never met anyone as genius as Leonardo da Vinci. According to Bülent Atalay, the author of Math and the Mona Lisa, during the last few years scientists in various fields of study decided to examine Leonardo’s work in the areas of science and technology and named him the first modern scientist. “Ultimately, it is the originality of his questions and the prescience of the solutions that still impress us after five hundred years” (Atalay 19). Although many of his original designs are kind of outdated, they have scientific concepts that are still being explored today. Leonardo da Vinci is considered by many as having been the typical “Renaissance Man”, meaning that he alone was an example of