thumb|right|, 1929, (The Thoughtful Professor)
The absent-minded professor is a stock character of popular fiction, usually portrayed as a talented scholar whose academic brilliance is accompanied by below-par 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 but below average on other measures of ability. Alternatively, they are considered to be so engrossed in their field of study that they forget their surroundings. The phrase is also commonly used 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 archetype is sometimes mixed with that of the mad scientist, often for comic effect, as in the Jerry Lewis film The Nutty Professor or the Professor Bacterio in the Mortadelo y Filemón comics and movies. However, a distinction is usually made that absent-minded professors are forgetful and careless rather than maliciously causing harm.
Examples of real scholars
thumb|upright=0.6|"[[The Astrologer who Fell into a Well"John Tenniel's illustration from an 1884 edition of Aesop's fables, based on a story about Thales of Miletus]]
The archetype is very old: the ancient Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtius wrote that the philosopher Thales walked at night with his eyes focused on the heavens and, as a result, fell down a well. A similar story is recounted of the ancient Indian philosopher Akṣapāda Gautama, the author of the Nyaya Sutras. As per the story, Gautama was always so engrossed in contemplation, that he would not even see things directly in front of him. Owing to this, Brahmā granted him with eyes (akṣa) on his feet (pāda), so that he could navigate himself, thus giving him the name Akṣapāda.
Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, André-Marie Ampère, Jacques Hadamard, Sewall Wright, Nikola Tesla, Norbert Wiener, Archimedes, Pierre Curie and Albert Einstein