Newton was known to keep manuscripts of his thoughts and workings on math/physics (and even more related to religion) which are kept in Cambridge I believe.
My question is, are there examples of the contrary; mathematicians who are thought not to have made extensive use of physical media (parchment/paper/computers) to do their work? Instead, they may have had strong mental "note-keeping" skills so to speak, as well as strong mental imagery.
They could still publish their results of course.
I originally posted this question on math.stackexchange, but closed it to post it on HSM. Some of the comments I received were broadly:
- Euler continued to work after becoming blind. In fact, half of his work was published after becoming blind.
- Ramanujan mostly wrote only his final results in his notebooks.
One other mathematician who was blind that I've come across since originally asking this question is Lev Pontryagin.