Academic alternatives to a Ph.D
Freeman Dyson had two advantages on his side: (i) He was brilliant. (ii) He was educated at a time when, as he put it, everything was "screwed up".

(ii) is no longer the case for any of us, or at least not in any of the countries where I take it that you want to be a professor. (i) may be true for you, but statistically speaking is not true for all but a very very small number of people; consequently, (i) also does not provide a route to becoming a professor, and certainly is not something anyone should bank upon.

In other words: Forget about becoming a professor without a PhD. While it may not be completely impossible, it is so unlikely that nobody could reasonably advise anyone to take that route. In actual practice, almost all professor job ads contain a phrase similar to "PhD in X or a related field is required", and there truly have to be exceptional reasons for a hiring committee to ignore this.

[I will add that all of the above specifically only applies to the sciences and mathematics; professors are frequently hired out of industry in engineering, education, and business departments, and I would not be surprised if other criteria apply in such cases.]