0 a person with a high level of knowledge or skill, especially someone who is less able in other ways: --
There are musical savants who are very awkward physically - until they sit at the piano.
Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe.
Generally, savants are very good at some specific cognitive domains but their mastery of language is poor.
On the other hand, the prototype of the truth seeker as a man of letters or savant is still with us.
These individuals may have hoped to create an image of themselves as savants as well as, or perhaps rather than, showmen.
However, none of our ingenieurs savants produced any new results or methods of lasting importance to numerical analysis.
But the foreign savants were to show no such hostility.
Next are the 'faux savants', all wearing gold spectacles; claiming science to be infallible, they chant contemporary scientific words with obvious anachronism.
Learning the impossible : the acquisition of possible and impossible languages by a polyglot savant.
