All human knowledge

I am a high school student, and I have been thinking about the way knowledge is structured. In schools and universities, we study subjects such as mathematics, physics, biology, and many others. This has led me to wonder: exactly how many subjects exist in total? It is generally understood that all the knowledge humanity currently possesses is finite and organized into distinct areas. I am interested in knowing whether there exists a comprehensive list, table, map, or conceptual framework that captures the entire body of known human knowledge without excluding anything. In other words, I am seeking a complete and exhaustive classification of all subjects, such that no area of knowledge is left unaccounted for. I wish to ensure that I am not unaware of any subject.

Librarians have systems that can classify every published book. And scientific publishers can classify every paper. Those don't add up to a complete classification of all human knowledge, but it's a substantial fraction of it.

If you skim the high-level book categories at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes, you may conclude this is is beyond a lifetime's work.

What about private knowledge such as my account password? I think you need to first rigorously define what you mean by "knowledge" and "subject".

I once read that if you tried to read every Wikipedia article for 12 hours a day, it would take you about 42 years to finish—assuming no new content gets added along the way.

- https://www.rxjourney.net/the-great-ocean-of-truth

MIT OpenCourseWare has a series of lectures on AI by Marvin Minsky and in one lecture he describes two projects in need of each other but were drifting apart that aimed to keep a beat on knowledge.

You may want to trace the history of librarianship.

This is a deep question. Many a great mind in history have thought about how to organize all of the world's knowledge systematically.

> Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us.. -- Denis Diderot

A key word is "ontology", a system or architecture of categories to group entities which represent objects, events, relationships between concepts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)

The Dewey Decimal Classes mentioned in another comment is a good start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes

Also..

Basic Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications - https://bartoc.org/about

Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization - https://www.isko.org/cyclo/kos

Universal Decimal Classification - https://udcc.org/index.php/site/page?view=subject_coverage

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Honestly, none of the lists are satisfyingly comprehensive. Like a fractal, you can zoom into any one subject, and it branches into more and more specific categories. Wikipedia has various lists and outlines that come closer to what you describe.

Outline of academic disciplines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_discipline...

> summary of the world's knowledge, in the form of an outline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contents/Outlines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_knowledge#Knowledge...

There is no map. Because knowledge and the relations between concepts are not static. Its a dynamical ever growing system.

Start with the library of congress classification system. It'll get you 90 percent of the way there for 10% of the effort.

(Classification systems are very much an information science topic... and they're pretty damn important. Along those same lines - you'll want to think carefully and critically about what is seen as canonical knowledge, and what's "in" those fields, versus what is perceived as "utter crackpot bullshit" that nobody takes seriously. The fields you've mentioned ALL have a significant amount of bleed at the edges - where does math become mathematical physics and then 'really physics' ... it's just not that easy.)

Fanboy comment: just google Eugene Garfield. Have fun!