He was the classic absent-minded professor, a philosopher so immersed in his studies that he often seemed to lose touch with life around him. At social gatherings, he would stand alone talking silently to himself, moving his lips and smiling—although, said a friend, if someone interrupted his reverie, "he immediately began a harangue." As a classroom lecturer, he would stutter and stammer for at least a quarter of an hour before hitting his oratorical stride. Contemporaries loved to talk about the night that he got out of bed absorbed in some theory and wandered 15 miles in his dressing gown before...
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