When in 1982 I traveled from Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, to University of California in San Diego,  to continue my education, my intention was to learn how to be a true researcher. My commitment to this pursuit made me change Ph.D. advisors two times. My third and final advisor,  János Komlós, challenged all my ideas about how a creative researcher should be: His bookshelf was conspicuously empty; and he worked mostly by taking long walks.

János  came from the excellent Hungarian school of discrete mathematics of Alfréd Rényi and Paul Erdős, where he evidently learned this technique. “What might be an advantage of walking?” I wondered, “You don’t have access to literature, or even a paper and pencil to write on!” I began to read about creativity. I observed János and other creative people. I remember watching a documentary where Picasso paints and talks about what goes on in his mind, and realizing that Picasso too worked in a similar way as János. I understood that creative genius was a result of a different way of thinking!

 János once told me about his close friend and colleague Endre Szemerédi: "Szemerédi does not do mathematics; God dictates it to him." I knew that this was not rooted in religion but in phenomenology. I also knew that the same was true for János himself.

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon the front page of Wikipedia, and learned that Endre Szemerédi had just received the Abel's prize (an equivalent to Nobel's prize in mathematics).