This guy. Paul Erdos
"A life-long celibate, Erdos was repelled by the idea of sexual pleasure and disliked being kissed or touched. He had no home."
www.wsj.com
"Dr. Erdos, a Jewish native of Budapest, lived a celibate, monkish and nomadic life devoted to mathematics. He had no home, lived out of a single suitcase and since the 1940s had traveled the world teaching, attending conferences and visiting mathematicians -- he simply stayed with friends the world over.
He was known to arrive, unannounced, at a friend's house with the simple announcement that "my brain is open." <------
While he was visiting, Dr. Erdos (pronounced AIR-dish) devoted a large part of his time to working with the hosts' mathematics problems, sometimes co-authoring technical articles with them.
It has been said that an above-average mathematician might publish about 20 articles and a really great one 50 in a lifetime. Dr. Erdos, who devoted 19 hours a day, every day, to mathematics, was the author of more than 1,500 works. In 1986, he published 50 papers -- in a field in which it is thought that most peak early."
"But outside mathematics, Erdös's inquisitiveness was limited to necessities like eating and driving; he had no time for frivolities like sex, art, fiction, or movies. Erdös last read a novel in the 1940s, and it was in the 1950s that he apparently saw his last movie, Cold Days, the story of an atrocity in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, in which Hungarians brutally drowned several thousand Jews and Russians. Once in a while the mathematicians he stayed with forced him to join their families on nonmathematical outings, but he accompanied them only in body. "I took him to the Johnson Space Center to see rockets," one of his colleagues recalled, "but he didn't even look up." Another mathematician took him to see a mime troupe, but he fell asleep before the performance started. Melvyn Nathanson, whose wife was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, dragged Erdös there. "We showed him Matisse," said Nathanson, "but he would have nothing to do with it. After a few minutes we ended up sitting in the Sculpture Garden doing mathematics."
"A life-long celibate, Erdos was repelled by the idea of sexual pleasure and disliked being kissed or touched. He had no home."
A Calculating Life - WSJ
www.wsj.com
"Dr. Erdos, a Jewish native of Budapest, lived a celibate, monkish and nomadic life devoted to mathematics. He had no home, lived out of a single suitcase and since the 1940s had traveled the world teaching, attending conferences and visiting mathematicians -- he simply stayed with friends the world over.
He was known to arrive, unannounced, at a friend's house with the simple announcement that "my brain is open." <------
While he was visiting, Dr. Erdos (pronounced AIR-dish) devoted a large part of his time to working with the hosts' mathematics problems, sometimes co-authoring technical articles with them.
It has been said that an above-average mathematician might publish about 20 articles and a really great one 50 in a lifetime. Dr. Erdos, who devoted 19 hours a day, every day, to mathematics, was the author of more than 1,500 works. In 1986, he published 50 papers -- in a field in which it is thought that most peak early."
"But outside mathematics, Erdös's inquisitiveness was limited to necessities like eating and driving; he had no time for frivolities like sex, art, fiction, or movies. Erdös last read a novel in the 1940s, and it was in the 1950s that he apparently saw his last movie, Cold Days, the story of an atrocity in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, in which Hungarians brutally drowned several thousand Jews and Russians. Once in a while the mathematicians he stayed with forced him to join their families on nonmathematical outings, but he accompanied them only in body. "I took him to the Johnson Space Center to see rockets," one of his colleagues recalled, "but he didn't even look up." Another mathematician took him to see a mime troupe, but he fell asleep before the performance started. Melvyn Nathanson, whose wife was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, dragged Erdös there. "We showed him Matisse," said Nathanson, "but he would have nothing to do with it. After a few minutes we ended up sitting in the Sculpture Garden doing mathematics."
