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The missing-minded professor is a stock character of popular fiction, usually portrayed as a talented academic Whose academic brilliance is accompagné by below-by functioning in other areas, leading to forgetfulness and mistakes. One explanation of this is that highly talented individuals often have unevenly distributed capabilities, being brilliant in their field of choice. Alternatively, they are considered to be ingrained in their field of study that they forget their surroundings.
The sentence “missing-minded professor” est aussi Commonly used more Generally in English to describe people Who are so engrossed in their “own world” that They fail to keep track of Their surroundings. It is a common stereotype that professors get so obsessed with their research that they pay little attention to anything else.
The stereotype is very old: the ancient Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius wrote that the philosopher Thales walked with his eyes focused on the heavens and, as a result, fell down a well . [1]
Examples of real absent-minded professors
Isaac Newton , [2] Adam Smith , Andre-Marie Ampere , Jacques Hadamard , Sewall Wright , Nikola Tesla , Norbert Wiener , Archimedes , Pierre Curie [3] and Albert Einstein [2] were all scholars considered to be absent-minded – their attention absorbed by their academic studies. William Archibald Spooner , Who Gave His Name to the spoonerism , Was Known For His off-mindedness and eccentricity.
Fictitious absent-minded professors
“Doc” Emmett Brown from Back to the Future is an example of an absent-minded professor in film. Another example is the title character in the film The Absent-Minded Professor and its less successful film remakes, based on the short story “A Situation of Gravity” by Samuel W. Taylor .
Examples in television include Professor Farnsworth in Futurama , Professor Frink in The Simpsons , Walter Bishop in the Fox television series Fringe , and Professor Von Schlemmer in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog . Multo, one of the characters in the children’s series The Zula Patrol , is another example of an absent-minded professor.
Professor Kokintz in The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley is an example from literature. Professor Branestawm , created in the 1930s by Norman Hunter , is an example of the Earlier archetype, and Jacques Paganel from the Jules Verne ‘s 1867 novel In Search of the Castaways is probably the codification of the archetype in the modern literature. Professor Character Potts in the story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang qualified as an absent-minded inventor.
Comic strip examples include Professor Calculus in The Adventures of Tintin ; Eli Eon in Little Orphan Annie ; and Professor Edgewise, a minor recurring character in Marvel Familystories.
Isaac Kleiner from the Half-Life saga, and Professor Harold MacDougal from Red Dead Redemption are in videogames.
The archetype is sometimes mixed with that of the mad scientist , often for comic effect, as in the Jerry Lewis movie The Nutty Professor or the Bacterio Profesor in the Mortadelo and Filemón comics and movies. However, the scientist usually has connotations of connotations, while the absent-minded faculty is typically characterized as benevolent.
The fictional absent-minded professor is often a professor of science or engineering; in the fantasy genre, a similar character may appear as a wizard . Examples of this include the characterization of Merlin in The Sword in the Stone (particularly in the Disney adaptation ) and Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series.