by Sheldon Greaves

The pursuit of knowledge and discovery is one of the most human of all essential human activities. It is far too important and way too much fun to be left to academics.

One of the greatest things anyone can do is to add significantly to the common store of ideas. Guerrilla Scholarship is a name given to a philosophy and frame of mind of those among us who are compelled to seek out new ideas, express them in art, science or scholarship, and use those ideas to make the world better. It's a lot less trite than it sounds.

Simply put, Guerrilla Scholarship means using unconventional means to persue the life of the mind. By the same token, it also means using intellectual tools to accomplish unusual or unconventional objectives.

I have isolated a few rules that are useful to those doing Guerrilla Scholarship. Here are some of them:

1. Know every relevant resource
2. You are an institution
3. Every subject has many tributaries and outflows that render it susceptible to unconventional research methods
4. No subject area exists in isolation
5. Expertise is where you find it
6. Acquire intellectual tools relentlessly

The aim of Guerrilla Scholarship and this site is to support and promote a community of independent scholars, amateur scientists, artists, etc. from widely varying fields. The Internet has made it possible for people from the narrowest specialties to find each and exchange ideas. We hope to use it for a complementary purpose: to bring widely disparate bodies of knowledge together to promote the cross-pollenization of ideas.