[anvandare]

The more complex (advanced) a society becomes, the more specialized its individual members have to become so the longer it takes to produce a unit for a specific function (basic education of people now takes 18 years of their life). With the exponential increase in scientific output (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/POS/turchFigs/IMG.FIG14.1.GIF) it becomes ever harder for an individual to keep up with multiple fields (in fact, I suspect that as soon as a field becomes _too_ big it automatically branches into new fields because of this).

It would have been possible to read every book in existence on mathematics in a lifetime in the 17th century, but not in the 21st century.