Studying on the toilet

From my comments:

"The Rambam studied for being a doctor on the toilet [...]The Vilna Gaon wrote a math book (Kramer's Law) on the toilet as well, likely it would not be allowed in modern universities if written today since the Gaon had no degree (nor a job to my knowledge)."

Rambam: I've never heard this about the Rambam, and even given how little a 13th century physician needed to know, I can't imagine the Rambam taking his expensive scrolls into a smelly fly-filled outhouse to study medicine. My guess, in fact, is that no one brought books into the bathroom until toilets could be flushed.

Gaon: He wrote, according to my friend X, a treatise on mathematics called Ayil Meshulash and (X continues) "there is other evidence that he valued secular knowledge, so I suppose the [toilet] myth developed around that. I don't think it's written anywhere, but rather is a bit of mythical oral culture."

PS: If universities made a habit of rejecting books written by unlettered authors, the four Annus Mirabilis Papers Einstein wrote in 1905 would never have seen the light of day. At the time, he was a patent clerk, with nothing but a teaching diploma from ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

[X will be named on request]