Jerry Lucas found it easier than most to let go. He had a couple of years remaining on his contract with the Knicks when he retired in 1974, but he wanted to do something more important with his life. He had a plan. Lucas always had a plan.

He was never the type to do things halfway. Why, for example, would he memorize one page of the phone book when he could memorize 500? Such were the feats of mental gymnastics that shaped Lucas’s reputation as one of the N.B.A.’s more iconoclastic personalities, that landed him on the “Tonight” show. But his self-described capacity for learning, for using his brain, was also what guided the next 40 years of his life.

In his never-ending quest to help educate the rest of humanity, Lucas, 73, has been working on an animated Web site that he hopes to unveil in December. It will be known as Doctor M’s Universe — Lucas is Doctor M, short for Doctor Memory — and he said it had the potential to change the world.

“I have an opportunity, in the near future, to revolutionize education,” Lucas said, adding that the site would be geared toward children. “There will be hundreds of learning planets: a writing planet, a reading planet, a spelling planet, a grammar and punctuation planet, on and on, where youngsters will fly their own spaceships at warp speed to go to learn automatically. That’s why I left basketball: to devote my life to this.”