[aardvarks]

He would sometimes eat lunch with us postdocs (just randomly, on a whim) when I was a postdoc at IAS. He would always have something interesting to say or ask, generally about science but often offbeat or unexpected -- you couldn't help but notice both his wide-ranging intellectual interests (our field was not quite within his main expertise) and his very gracious manner in starting conversations that both he and we would learn from.

[astrophysician]

Thanks for sharing — yea completely agree, it’s always so much fun to be around people like Dyson. There’s more like him at Princeton (and everywhere else, I was at university if Illinois for undergrad and the story is the same there), they just get a kick out of being curious, and always are genuinely interested to learn and hear new things, no matter how old they get. Such a pleasure to be around — they aren’t bitter or insecure, they don’t have anything to prove, they just think that some things are just so gosh darn cool, and that fun energy is contagious.

[refurb]

I had a professor in graduate school like that. He was probably 70 and did natural product chemistry.

Unlike the other professors who were hard asses because: 1) they were still making a name for themselves or 2) they dealt with it in grad school, so you should too, he was the friendliest, most curious person. You could be a 2nd year undergrad and if you asked an interesting question, he’d get genuinely excited about it.