There is a story about mathematician Paul Erdos. He cared about nothing except math. Since he did not have a bank account, when he won a prestigious prize in math, he got it in cash.
A friend and he were walking to go to dinner when Erdos was approached by a beggar. "How much will dinner be?" he asked his friend. "About $25, I think."
Erdos carefully peeled $25 from a thick wad of bills--around $5000 as I recall--and gave the rest to the beggar.
--Boris
This act appears to be a perversion of one of Erdos' self-deprecating sayings, "I should be put under tutelage." (In Hungary, if a rich aristocrat became senile, his family put him under tutelage, i.e., he was given expenses but couldn't touch the capital.