Absent-Minded Professor

"The Shee were a race unique in their mindset, most likely having invented the steam engine as an offshoot of an attempt to design a better way of brewing tea before they invented the wheel."

- Creatures

This Stock Character is a brilliant scientist, but very flighty, often forgetting things like the date, people's names, meetings, eating, people's names, etc. Good thing he (and it's very often a he) is good at what he does and often has perfect memory for scientific details or mathematical values. Sometimes he becomes so engrossed in his work that he loses track of his very surroundings.

This is a very old character type, referred to by this name since at least 1864.

A subtrope of The Professor. Compare also... um... blast it!... ah yes, the Mad Scientist, who often exhibits this trait. I do so only reluctantly. And of course, I must mention my colleagues in the math department. Some of them go a bit beyond absent-minded, though.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must nip on home, as I seem to have forgotten to put on my pants. Ah, the hair? Oh, yes, I should try to comb it some time... I do have a comb, don't I? A Sub-Trope of...oh, yes, Forgetful Jones. Compare with Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny.

Anime & Manga

 * Prof. Banner from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX qualifies, even though his profession is alchemy.
 * Doctor Professor Franken Stein from Soul Eater.
 * Gadgeteer Genius Dr. Hiroshi Agasa of Detective Conan, together with Einstein Hair and a German accent in the dub.
 * Read or Die: Yomiko Readman qualifies. She's not a professor (although she is a substitute teacher), but she gets so caught up in her reading that her friend Nenene has to leave post-it notes scattered around her apartment reminding her to do things like close the door and eat.
 * Field Marshal Tenpou isn't technically a professor, but otherwise fits this trope to a T. He's like if you took an absent minded professor and made him a military officer. Though he does notably teach Goku to read, (which saves his later incarnation, Hakkai, who is a teacher but the opposite of absentminded, from doing so) Oh! this takes place in Saiyuki by the way!
 * Wataru Amanogawa from the Sailor Moon Stars season is a schoolteacher version of this (Though he could have been an uni professor, he declined it due to personal preferences.)

Comics

 * There is a throwaway gag in the The Adventures of Tintin album The Broken Ear, a man mistaking a parrot for a lady. The man is completely unimportant to the story (the parrot is the point) but Hergé took the time to identify him as 1) very absent-minded and 2) a Professor.
 * Speaking of Tintin, Professor Calculus has some aspects of this. He is also stone deaf. This was Played for Laughs too. Calculus is, in fact, the quintessential absent-minded professor. He probably predates most of the examples listed on this page.
 * Also in Tintin, the album Cigars of the Pharaoh has the very absent-minded Dr. Sarcophagus, an egyptologist.
 * Flemish comic book series Suske en Wiske has Professor Barabas.
 * Flemish comics are full of these. Jommeke has Professor Gobelijn, and Piet Pienter en Bert Bibber even had two: Professor Kumulus and Hilarius Warwinkel.
 * The Ur-example in American comics has to be Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, best known for being able to completely ignore his bombshell wife to work with test-tubes.
 * Peter Parker once channeled Reed, ignoring Gwen Stacy while he worked on a science project.
 * Professor Schimauski, by German artist Walter Moers.
 * Perhaps the oldest example, the titular character of Savant Cosinus by Christophe (1893), was so absent-minded he once forgot he was in a dentist's waiting room and was mistaken for the dentist by a patient who told him she needed a root extracted. Cosinus then suggests to use tables of logarithms to perform the operation (confusing the root of a tooth with a square root...)

Films -- Animation

 * Beauty and the Beast has Belle's father Maurice. He invents strange contraptions, gets lost in the woods on his way back from a fair, ignores his horse Philippe's instincts to turn back, and ultimately ends up as the Beast's temporary prisoner.

Films -- Live Action

 * "Doc" Emmett Brown from Back to The Future.
 * Bullshot (1983). Professor Rupert Fenton, of the Royal Society of Scientific Discoverers.
 * Dr. Phillip Brainard in Flubber, who continually forgets to arrive at his own wedding, as he would get caught up in some experiment and lose track of time. The movie itself is a remake of another Disney film named The Absent-Minded Professor.
 * Professor Keenbean to an extent in the Richie Rich film.
 * Dr. Steve Mills from My Stepmother Is An Alien.
 * Wayne Szalinski from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. He is an absent-minded professor, mixed with Man Child to the point of lampshading it in Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, and he's even more so in the TV series starring Peter Scolari.
 * Dr. Kelp, The Nutty Professor version 1.
 * Dr. Reinhardt Lane in The Shadow (1994).
 * Gregor the Elder from Waterworld, who accidentally activates his dirigible before his friends arrive, abandoning them during the sack of the atoll.
 * Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
 * Dr. Marcus Brody is turned into something like this. It's frequently mentioned he got lost in his own museum (one that he was the curator for)! Granted, he was getting older...
 * At one point, Indy tries to return to his office and is besieged by students because he hasn't been grading any of their work. He has to climb out the window to escape.
 * Subverted by Henry Jones, Sr. in the same movie: he is taken by many (including Indy) be an absent-minded professor, but in the end betrays himself as a man who is more attuned to his environment than originally thought.
 * Harold Medford in the classic giant-mutant-ant movie Them
 * The drunk mathematician in Strangers on a Train becomes a plot point—because of his forgetfulness, Guy is suspected of a murder he didn't commit.
 * Dr. Pennyworth in the spoof Monster in the Closet.

What do I need to say next? ... Jokes?
"Prof 1: What's the time of the day? Prof 2 (pulls out a matchbox): Tuesday. Prof 3: Then we have to aboard!"
 * Three professors from the university of Prague are walking through a shopping arcade.

(And they leave for the street.)
 * A biology professor announces a pop quiz, students will be forced to identify species of birds from their droppings. "Our first specimen--" He reaches into a brown paper bag and pulls out a ham sandwich. He frowns and dumps out the bag, revealing an apple and bag of chips. "My word," he blurts out, "What did I eat for lunch?"
 * Older Than Feudalism : The absent-minded professor is a favorite character of the Philogelos, a Greco-Roman joke book dating back to the third century AD.

Literature

 * Reg from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is an example, to the point of not remembering his own age
 * Professor Branestawm from the children's books by Norman Hunter perfectly embodies this trope.
 * Dr. Jacob Buckman from The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who gets so caught up in the opportunity to observe the formation of a new star that he completely forgets to mention to anyone that the resulting gravitational shifts will release a race of hostile aliens into the galaxy.
 * Earlier, he'd been so caught up in the observations he was taking as the ship he was on travelled through the outer layers of a red supergiant that he commented "If the Langston Field collapses, it'll ruin everything!"—referring to the loss of his data, not to the destruction of the ship or his own death.
 * In Steve Perry's Black Steel, Sleel's parents were revealed to be the two most famous botanists alive, and both embody this trope. The robot that delivers their meals had to be set with an annoying alarm that required a manual shut off, thus ensuring that they would stop work for meals.
 * Pretty much all the wizards at the Unseen University. The Bursar's mind in particular is on an extended leave of absence.
 * There's no non-magical university on Discworld, but if there were, Leonard of Quirm would also be an example. As it is, he's merely an absent-minded polymath.
 * Xenophilius Lovegood from the later Harry Potter books seems to fit the trope without actually being an academic of any stripe, if he's not actually an outright Cloudcuckoolander.
 * Samuel W. Taylor's short story "A Situation of Gravity" was the inspiration for The Absent-Minded Professor film.
 * An oceanographer in Der Schwarm conforms so exactly to this that it seems like really lazy writing, until you remember that the huge cast contains at least a dozen other professors, none of whom is anything like him.
 * Professor Pike of HIVE appears to be disorganized and distracted but has a brilliant and cunning mind.
 * Professor Plum is depicted this way in the series of Clue books.
 * Land of Oz series: The Scarecrow. Brilliant fellow, but in the second book he forgets that all of Oz speaks a single, common language.
 * Professor Pinkerton-Barnes from Barnaby Grimes. He completely fails to notice when Barnaby is in a hurry to get away and track down the villain, instead prattling on about his latest theory, which involves small birds being turned savage by fruit.
 * Played with in one of the Honor Harrington novels when WEB Du Havel responds to Anton's demand that he keep an eye on the Princess and Anton's daughter with the derisive comment that he's an absent minded professor and that they'll outwit him left and right.
 * Enrique Burgos in the Vorkosigan Saga.
 * Several characters created by Robert Heinlein fit this trope.
 * Daniel Boone Davis of The Door Into Summer was absent-minded enough that he allowed his small engineering company to be taken from him by his business partner and his fiance because he was too busy designing the next big thing. Subverted in that
 * Jacob Burroughs of The Number of the Beast is described early in the novel as performing advanced mathematical calculations in his head, but needing to grab a calculator to learn that 2+2=4.
 * Annabeth's father in Percy Jackson and The Olympians. He often loses his track of mind,if even the smallest thing reminds him about history.
 * Also by Rick Riordan; Thoth from The Kane Chronicles who spends quite a while yammering on about his barbecue despite the fact that there are far more pressing things like the fact that Set is free again.
 * A classic example would be Jacques Eliacin Francois Marie Paganel, a French geographer in Jules Verne novel In Search of the Castaways.
 * Mr. Meredith from the Anne of Green Gables series, though he is a minister and not a professor. He is so absent-minded that he doesn't notice when his children bring home an orphan that stays for a fortnight, or that his daughter rides pigs through the town. He once went to marry a couple and started to recite a funeral prayer instead of the marriage service. When the groom calls him on it, he rectifies his mistake, but the narrator notes that the bride never truly felt married from that day on.
 * Mr. Welch, a professor of history in the novel Lucky Jim, is usually too scatterbrained to finish a sentence properly.

Live Action TV
"Larry: When you met me, was I coming or leaving the physics building?"
 * Chilean children's show Cachureos had an Image song named "El profesor distra?", roughly translated as "Absent-Minded Schoolteacher".
 * Doctor Who: The Doctor is prone to acting like this, depending somewhat on the incarnation. He's quite likely more intelligent than any human being in history, but he's prone to Buffy-Speak, Disorganized Outline Speeches, Metaphorgotten, Cloudcuckoolander-ness in general, and can hardly pilot his TARDIS or even remember what its buttons and knobs do. Sometimes this is Obfuscating Stupidity, but often it isn't.
 * In one of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novels, The Multiverse is in danger and the Doctor is in his lab sorting it out. He leaves for a couple minutes and accidentally smacks one of his companions in the face with a door, giving him a nosebleed, and doesn't seem to notice. Four days later, he gives him a soiled handkerchief and apologizes, apparently unaware that four days have passed. As the same companion said in a much-earlier book, "Ladies and gentlemen, the mind of a Time Lord."
 * This is 11. No doubt about it. His behavior in The Big Bang exemplifies this.
 * Walter Bishop in Fringe is a sound example. He constantly forgets the name of his lab assistant, flies off on tangents to talk about foodstuffs he likes, and delivers rambling anecdotes that may eventually lead to him remembering vitally important high-tech principles, or may go absolutely nowhere.
 * In the episode "Safe:"
 * It seems to be largely a result of his mental illness, though . His younger self and   aren't absent-minded at all.
 * "Letters of Transit" takes place in an alternate future, and Walter has had brain damage which makes him even wackier then usual.
 * Daniel Faraday, Lost. The youngest graduate of Oxford in its history, professor in his 20s, pioneer in ... and he can barely remember anything.
 * Both Charlie Epps and Larry Fleinhardt of Numb3rs are prone to this. Charlie gets better as the series progresses, but Larry is often prone to being so deep in contemplation of either physics, math or philosophy that he forgets what's going on around him.


 * One episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine includes a professor so absent-minded and such an Insufferable Genius that his wife uses a telepathic double to romance Captain Sisko to deal with his neglect. The professor was amusingly played by Richard Kiley, best known for portraying Don Quixote.
 * Battlestar Galactica. In the first season Dr. Baltar appears to be this, with his odd habit of rambling on to himself. No one gives him more than a funny look as, after all, he's just the usual quirky genius, right? It's not as if he's got an imaginary Cylon in his head or something.
 * Ambrose/Glitch from Tin Man. Somewhat justified as the Big Bad really did take half his brain and keep it in a jar.
 * The scientist in The Outer Limits episode Double Helix. His son calls him out on being so focused on his research that he was never there for his family. The scientist is incredibly shocked when he finds out that his teenage son is dating a 30 year old woman.

Puppet Shows

 * The Muppet Show: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

Radio
"Crun: Well, now that you've asked me a straightforward question... I have no option... but to give you a direct answer. [long pause] ...What was the question again? Seagoon: Does that mean aeroplanes can land on it? Crun: Land on what? Seagoon: The aerodrome! Crun: Ohh! Am I building one of those? ...And that's if you're lucky and he doesn't just fall asleep halfway through a sentence."
 * The Goon Show's Henry Crun, although an occasionally brilliant inventor, is both incredibly absent-minded and ridiculously old, meaning conversations about his latest creation tend to go like this:

Hmm... I know there's something to do with games and tabletops... Oh yes! Tabletop Games!

 * Dr. McQuark in the Champions supplement "The Blood and Dr. McQuark".
 * The trope is used to explain the difference between wisdom and intelligence in Dungeons & Dragons.
 * The Izzet League from the Ravnica plane in Magic: The Gathering. Turns out that stressing creativity and having Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny produces interesting magic, large explosions, bizarre gizmos, and no-one having any idea what they're actually doing except that it's a lot of fun and makes a loud noise.

Video Games
""Dear Dr. Breen. Help! I've been taken prisoner by an alcoholic and a stereotypical absent-minded professor! Send Striders!""
 * Professor E. Gadd from Luigi's Mansion.
 * Professor Frankly from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door—he's pretty much the Goomba equivalent of Prof. Farnsworth.
 * Dr Kleiner, from Half-Life, whilst technically not a professor, nevertheless exhibits many similar characteristics to the generic absent-minded professor. He's even called as such in Concerned:

"That's right! I remember now! His name is DOUCHE!"
 * In Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, the Wizard class is this, with lines such as "Where did I put my spellbook?" Even the Easter Egg line is a mix-and-match of two old sayings. And on the game's official site, a story shows a wizard humming through the forest when a troll appears. The wizard quickly kills the troll and continues looking for mushrooms as if nothing happened.
 * Aldanon from Neverwinter Nights 2.
 * Pokémon Red and Blue's Professor Oak is so absent-minded he doesn't remember his own grandson's name, leaving it up to the player to remind him.


 * Professor Pickle from Sonic Unleashed.
 * The Professor in some of the Spyro the Dragon games.
 * Dr. Crygor in Wario Ware.
 * Kang the Mad in Jade Empire pretty much breathes this trope to live.
 * Dr. Warren Vidic of Assassin's Creed is an evil example. The guy is under a lot of pressure, but would it kill him to put his security pen on the inside of his pocket so that he doesn't lose it and necessitate the entire complex's passwords being reset, or punctuate his emails, or treat the Animus subjects like people rather than vending machines for genetic memory?
 * Momo of Breath of Fire III is a female example.
 * Lucca of Chrono Trigger is milder than most of these examples, but when she saw Robo sitting inactive in the middle of an abandoned building the post-apocalyptic future, her immediate reaction is to repair it. Her father may also be of this character type (or just a workaholic), because in an optional subquest you read a younger Lucca's diary and she's very angry at her dad at neglecting herself and her mother.
 * Various lines from Maria and the Professor himself in the flashback levels of Shadow the Hedgehog imply Shadow's creator, Professor Gerald, to be this as well as a Mad Scientist.
 * In Fallout: New Vegas DLC Old World Blues, turns out to be this. In his case, it's a combination of
 * EarthBound has absent minded Dr. Andonuts. When his son Jeff meets his father at his lab, Dr. Andonuts forgot that he even had a son.
 * In The Sims 3 you can apply a trait called Absent Minded.

Web Comics

 * In Wapsi Square, Monica's boss, Dr. Gregory Fields, has traces of this. He was most likely written to be reminiscent of Marcus Brody, and while he never got lost in his own museum, he did forget the security code.
 * The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: Charles Babbage. On more than one occasion, he gets distracted from important stuff by minor details. While chasing a rogue steam-powered economic model that was wreaking havoc on everything in its path, he became obsessed with devising a means to protect it from damage while doing so rather than stopping it from moving.
 * Flaky Pastry got Professor Tracy Ace. As the cast page says, "Even those students who attend her classes aren't sure what she teaches. She is known to have a very tenuous connection with reality." Two pages later she explains that the assignment is out of it on purpose… and she actually can and does teach something potentially useful outside these classes… but she still fails to remember the student's name even for a few seconds.

Web Original

 * Herr Doktor Archeville from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe. Brilliant scientist, and one of the most agile minds on the planet. Often forgets what city he's in, can't remember the actual names of his lab assistants so he labels them "Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta" and so on (and then get's that mixed up) and if those same lab assistants weren't paid to remind him would often forgets he needs to eat and sleep every so often.
 * From The Onion: Cure for Cancer "Around here somewhere".
 * Doctor Chronopolis from Red Panda Adventures.
 * Doctor Filbert R. Z. Quintain, M.S., Ph.D., F.A.A.S., the expert on mutant powers at Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe.
 * Aspa from Greek Ninja.

Western Animation

 * Female example: Gadget from Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers is a Wrench Wench, a Gadgeteer Genius, and this. Sparky's a more traditional male version of this trope.
 * Good news everyone! Professor Farnsworth of Futurama, who is also very old.
 * Extra credit goes to the episode "A Big Ball of Garbage", where he goes to an inventor's competition, realizes the invention he brought (the death clock) is the same one he showed last year, attempts to invent the same thing again after it's pointed out to him ("I need a new invention! Perhaps some kind of death clock..."), quickly creates a new invention (the smell-o-scope) to replace it, then only hours later... "Finished!" "You built the smell-o-scope?" "No, I remembered that I'd already built it last year!"
 * Prof. Frink from The Simpsons.
 * Gune from Titan A.E..
 * Professor Sumdac of Transformers Animated. Occasionally forgets important things like eating, and doesn't have much common sense in general.
 * Professor Ludwig Von Drake, who started out as an absent-minded lecturer in the Wonderful World of Color (the continuation of the Disneyland program), eventually becoming an inventor by the time of House of Mouse and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
 * A villainous example is Professor Calamitus from The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, who was unable to finish anything (including his... um... his... sentences! That's it!) and had to kidnap Jimmy so that he could finish his inventions for him.
 * Professor Von Schlemmer, of the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, fits this to a tee.
 * The Vector in Skyland.
 * Cosmo from The Fairly OddParents, has been described by Butch Hartman, its creator, as such.
 * Steven Boxleitner from Word Girl seems to be this; at least before his experiment went horribly wrong...
 * Wallace from Wallace and Gromit, though he's more "eccentric" than "scattered".
 * César from Generator Rex. He's superhumanly capable as a scientist and a master of technology decades ahead of the rest of the world, but forgets a lot of things not directly related to research. This isn't played entirely for comedy either, as he may have On top of that,
 * Wizard version: The Moochick from the original My Little Pony. Very knowledgeable... to the point where he can have difficulty remembering a particular detail at first, like where he stashed the Rainbow of Light.
 * In the Venture Bros episode Pomp and Circuitry Rusty jokes that his son Dean will one day grow up to be this. Rusty himself sometimes qualifies, as he is sometimes a professor (guest lecturer in Mexico) and sometimes whole plotlines revolve around him being absent-minded (Escape to the House of Mummies Part 2). Also he has been known to forget the names of his own sons.
 * 1973/74 Superfriends episode "The Mysterious Moles". Maximus Mole is retired professor of speleology (caves & caverns). He's extremely absent-minded, forgetting things on a regular basis.
 * Another episode features a scientist who invents a supercomputer that can control any mechanical device in the world by remote control, and tries to use it for philanthropic purposes, eliminating the need for physical exertion of any sort. The trouble starts, however, when he accidentally leaves his cheese sandwich on a console, which attracts a mouse, who proceeds to get into the computer and cause it to go haywire.
 * In Dexter's Laboratory Ego Trip, Old Man Dexter is a much more brilliant scientist than the present-day Dexter, creating miraculous technology for the good of humanity. However, he suffers from poor memory due to his old age, and can't remember the details of the battle with Mandark, even though Mandark's Brain In a Jar is proof of the villain's defeat. Thus, when present-day Dexter arrives in his Time Machine, they both have to go to the actual time period where it happened (with Dexter's teenage self) to inquire with their adult self.

Real Life

 * There was a legend about Thales, the sixth-century B.C. philosopher and mathematician, falling into a well because he was gazing at the stars instead of watching where he was going. This tale became so iconic that it was eventually immortalized as one of Aesop's Fables, making this one Older Than Feudalism.
 * A well-known legend about the 3rd-century B.C. mathematician Archimedes says that when he stumbled upon the solution to a problem he was wracking his brain on (how to non-destructively tell whether or not a crown was pure gold), he got so excited that he leaped out of the bath and ran naked through the streets shouting, "Eureka!" ("I've found it!").
 * There is also the tale of his death: a Roman soldier tried to ask him where Archimedes could be found, not knowing it was him, as his boss wanted him alive. Unable to get the old man's attention (he was solving a geometrical problem on a sand table), the soldier got angry and eventually killed him. Archimedes' last words? "Do not disturb my circles!"
 * Isaac Newton is said to have invited a friend to dinner but to have subsequently forgotten about it. When the friend dropped by he found Newton in deep contemplation and, not wanting to disrupt his train of thought, sat and waited. Eventually a servant brought up dinner for one and the friend, still too polite to disturb his host, ate by himself. When Newton finally snapped out of it, he looked at the empty dishes and said, "If it weren't for the proof before my eyes, I could have sworn that I have not yet dined."
 * It is also said that Newton calculated Earth's orbit, explaining mathematically why it was elliptic, and then forgot all about it. He only thought of it again when astrophysicist Edmund Halley (the guy with the comet) asked him for help with the same problem.
 * Newton has a million of these. Another one involved him getting distracted on the way home by a student, and finishing by asking the student which way he was walking (he had forgotten whether he was just entering or just leaving the university building). His response when the student tells him that he was walking out of the university? "Wonderful. That means I've had lunch already."
 * One of the most infamous ones involve Newton using a potential love interest's pinky to clean his pipe. It is noteworthy that Newton by all accounts never married or was seriously connected to anyone and died (proudly) a virgin at the age of 84.
 * Albert Einstein.
 * Also subverted. Well-known is the idea that he often wore socks of a mismatched color. Less but still well-known is the idea that he always wore socks of matching thicknesses.
 * He once called his wife from a phone booth and asked her to remind him where he was going, because he forgot on the way.
 * He once used a $1500 cheque as a bookmark and lost the book.
 * John Nash, an MIT mathematician. Good at what he does, but very strange (there's a book and an Oscar Bait movie). One of his students asked him to demonstrate a proof. Which he did, mostly in his head. This was often his habit, writing only a handful of crucial steps out, leaving the "obvious" leaps in between to others. This time, the student creatively asked, "I'm not sure I understand, Professor. Could you do it in another way?" Nash thought about it for a moment, said, "Yes, certainly," then once again dashed out a couple of crucial steps on the board, for a different proof.
 * A variant of the same story is told about Norbert Wiener, the MIT prof who coined the term (and subject) cybernetics.
 * Oppenheimer was an Adorkable social dunce who could barely exist without his wife guiding him in mundane activities. He was also known for helping invent the atomic bomb. About as extreme an example of Beware the Nice Ones as you can get.
 * A story about Wiener (admittedly second hand). He was on sabbatical when his office was needed for a visiting professor. One look at the piles of papers and the admins hunted up his daughter, who was a student at MIT at the time. Some time later she was heard laughing and asked what about. She replied that near the bottom of one of the piles she had found a note congratulating Norbert on the birth of his daughter, her!
 * Pavlov, known for his work on classical conditioning, was strict and disciplined in the lab, asking the same of his assistants. (He once chastised an assistant for arriving late to work during the Russian revolution. The man had been late because he had to avoid stray bullets and an angry mob.) Outside of work, Pavlov was dirt poor, as he often forgot to pick up his own paychecks and had a tendency to lose them. On a trip to New York, he carried all his money in a big visible wad, only to be mugged in the subway. His hosts had to gather contributions to make up for his lost funds. He also once gave his wife a pair of shoes as a gift as she was about to go for a trip. Once at her destination, she found she had only one of the two shoes, with a note from her husband saying he had kept the other one to remind himself of her until her return (he failed to realize she'd need both). It's said his wife stayed with him despite his obvious absent-mindedness because she recognized his genius when in a lab.
 * The other wiki has their own article about this. Showoffs....
 * Then there's Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics who, amongst other things, was famous for boiling bread and butter in a teapot and declaring it to be the worst cup of tea he ever had.
 * Russian composer/chemist Alexander Borodin, while in the army, went out one day to review his troops. Having forgotten to put on his trousers.
 * This is commonly a characteristic of the INTP.
 * The Curie boys (discoverers of piezoelectricity). Pierre described hitherto unknown magnetic effects, was the co-worker on the experiments that led to the discovery of radium, and after dinner you could ask him "how was that steak?" and he'd reply "I had a steak?"
 * G. K. Chesterton was notorious for this:
 * "On rising this morning," he wrote to a friend, "I carefully washed my boots in hot water and blackened [polished] my face, poured coffee on my sardines, and put my hat on the fire to boil. These activities will give you some idea of my state of mind..."
 * Famously, he once sent a telegraph to his wife: "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" She telegraphed back, "Home."
 * French physicist André-Marie Ampère was notoriously absent-minded too, inspiring the fictional Savant Cosinus.
 * This guy
 * Part of this has been suggested to stem from ADHD; one known aspect of it is so called "hyperfocus" where someone will ignore virtually everything to the point of exclusivity. ADHD also helps explain part of the eccentricities that go hand-in-hand with this trope.
 * Dyspraxia also leads to poor focus, difficulty in organising thoughts and poor short term memory, but doesn't have any effect on actual intelligence.

...Professors! Yes, Absent-Minded Professors!

...What am I doing here again?