Absent-minded professor

The absent-minded professor is a of popular fiction, usually portrayed as a talented academic 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 "absent-minded professor" is also 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 Laërtius wrote that the philosopher Thales walked at night with his eyes focused on the heavens and, as a result, fell down a well.

Isaac Newton,Adam Smith, André-Marie Ampère, Jacques Hadamard, Sewall Wright, Nikola Tesla, Norbert Wiener, Archimedes, Pierre Curie and Albert Einstein 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 absent-mindedness and eccentricity.

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Wikipedia