Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) was a French mathematician of astonishing output — he is said to have produced hundreds of works — with a personal motto that life is only good for two things: doing mathematics and teaching it.
When a field is shaped by a source spread through space — charge creating an electric field, mass
creating gravity — it obeys
As a child Poisson was so clumsy with his hands that his family tried steering him toward almost any trade but the delicate ones — the classic tale is that he could barely be trusted to hold a needle or a paintbrush. Mathematics needed no coordination beyond a pen, and there he was unstoppable. He rose to the very top of French science, yet he supposedly said his real talents were just doing and teaching maths — the two things that never required steady fingers.