Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. He conceptualised flying machines, an armoured vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine,and the double hull, also outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics His vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.