Source
of Leonardo Academy’s Name
Leonardo Academy was
named after the Leonardo da Vinci Academy, an earlier nonprofit founded by
Gunnar Johansen.
Gunnar Johansen was born
in Copenhagen, Demark in 1906 and lived in the United States from the late 1920s
until his death in 1991. He was a pianist, composer, teacher and the first
musical Artist-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin.
During his lifetime,
Johansen was concerned that the fragmentation of human knowledge into separate
disciplines was becoming a barrier to solving the world’s problems. To promote
interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving, Johansen
established the Leonardo da Vinci Academy, a nonprofit organization devoted to
the integration of the arts and sciences and the development of
interdisciplinary solutions.
The Leonardo da Vinci
Academy held symposiums on many issues, primarily concerning energy and the
environment. Noteworthy participants in these symposiums included Edward Teller,
inventor of the American hydrogen bomb, and Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the
geodesic dome.
The Leonardo da Vinci
Academy was shut down before Johanson passed away in 1991.
In 1997, Michael Arny
founded a new nonprofit to address energy, environmental and sustainability
issues. The need for interdisciplinary solutions to the world’s problems
remained as pressing as it had in the 1970’s, and Arny named the new
organization Leonardo Academy to honor the work of Johanson and his
organization.
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