There’s a lot to love about Richard Feynman. The man was a brilliant physicist, lock-picker, jokester, story-teller, teacher, and so much more.
The way Stanford professor Leonard Susskind put it, “he always made me feel smart… He made me feel he was smart. He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem together.”
But, for a while at least, Feynman didn’t brush his teeth, according to his colleague Murray Gell-Mann. He thought brushing was a superstition. Gel-Mann says his dentists had a lot of trouble. At one point, they even brought in scientific studies, trying to get the guy to brush and floss.
Some of his other habits were more amusing. He worked at Caltech for much of his life. The Caltech faculty club had a jacket-and-tie dress policy. Every morning, he would show up at work with a jacket and tie. But every day, by noon, he’d no longer be wearing them. When he got to the faculty club for lunch, he’d go to the backup wardrobe and pick out a messy tie and beat-up jacket for lunch.
Source Murray Gell-Mann talks about Richard Feynman
(If you haven’t read them already, I highly recommend Feynman’s books Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?; they’re probably the two best things I’ve read in the past year.)