Sheldon Cooper

• 1. Introduction

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  Sheldon Lee Cooper has five sets of academic initials after his name: B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D. and Sc.D. He is a fictional theoretical physicist. Viewers first met him in the CBS series The Big Bang Theory, which ran from 2007 to 2019. Later he became the title character of the spinoff Young Sheldon, which ran from 2017 to 2024. Jim Parsons plays the adult version. Iain Armitage plays the boy, and Parsons narrates the spinoff. The series casts Sheldon as its antihero, and his habits supply most of the humor around him. That humor made him the show's breakout character. So where did this difficult man come from? What lies beneath his strict rules and fears? And why did co-creator Bill Prady decline to label him, while the actor who plays him offered a different view?

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• 2. Making Sheldon

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  The first model for Sheldon was a computer programmer whom co-creator Bill Prady knew personally. The name came from somewhere else. Sheldon and his friend Leonard Hofstadter together honor three men: actor and producer Sheldon Leonard, scientist Robert Hofstadter and Nobel Prize laureate Leon Cooper.

  Chuck Lorre first pictured Johnny Galecki in the role. Galecki thought he would be "better suited" to Leonard, and that is the part he got. Then Jim Parsons auditioned for Sheldon. Lorre said Parsons was "so startlingly good" that he was asked to audition again "to make sure he hadn't gotten lucky".

  The first four episodes show a slightly different Sheldon from the one audiences came to know. Prady said the character "began to evolve after episode five or so and became his own thing". That finished version would eventually be given a full childhood of his own on screen.

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• 3. Medford Roots

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  Sheldon and his fraternal twin sister, Missy, were born on the 26th of February 1980 at a Kmart in Galveston, Texas. They grew up in Medford, a fictional small town in East Texas, about three hours by car from Dallas. Their mother, Mary Cooper, is an overtly devout Baptist. Their father, George Cooper Sr., is a high school football coach. An older brother, George Jr., completes the household.

  Sheldon's first word was "hypotenuse", spoken at four months old. His interest in science started early. So did the trouble it caused him, because his quirks and open pride in his own intellect made classmates and neighbors bully him.

  In the original series, Sheldon once got his father fired. He told a store owner named Mr. Hinckley that George was stealing from the cash register. Young Sheldon changes that account. There George loses a coaching job in Galveston after reporting that other coaches were illegally recruiting players, and the family must return to Medford. This father drinks, mostly beer, but he is a loving parent who tries to understand his gifted son.

  The only relative who actively encouraged Sheldon's science was his maternal grandfather, whom he called Pop-Pop. Pop-Pop died when Sheldon was five. Sheldon's Christmas wish to bring him back went unanswered, which is why Sheldon does not care much for the holiday. An aunt also backed his ambitions by giving him medical equipment, so he would have a trade if physics failed. His closest relative is his maternal grandmother, whom he calls Meemaw and who calls him Moon Pie. Young Sheldon adds a childhood friend named Tam, who introduced him to comic books and Dungeons & Dragons.

  Missy grows up to be a tall, attractive brunette, and George Jr. owns a chain of tire stores called Dr. Tire, headquartered in Dallas. Adult Sheldon says both siblings beat him up as children, and their mother calls them "dumb as soup". In the pilot, Sheldon tells Leonard that DNA guarantees nothing, since his own twin sister is a hostess at Fuddruckers. The Young Sheldon finale echoes that line in a talk with Amy about their future children.

  George Sr. died of a heart attack at work before the series begins, when Sheldon was 14. The wider family is stranger. Uncle Edward is nicknamed "Stumpy" after cleaning a woodchipper by hand. Another uncle, Carl Cooper, was killed by a badger while cleaning a chimney. In "The Engagement Reaction", Sheldon says the ashes of Aunt Ruth and Uncle Roger sit in a coffee can on his mother's mantle.

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• 4. A Mind Without Measure

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  At eleven, Sheldon entered college, and at fourteen he graduated summa cum laude. The Big Bang Theory never names his undergraduate school. Sheldon insists it outranks the alma maters of his colleagues: Princeton for Leonard, Cambridge for Raj, MIT for Howard and Harvard for Amy. The season 12 episode "The Tam Turbulence" implies he is a Caltech alumnus. Young Sheldon first enrolls him at the fictional East Texas Tech, then at Caltech in its final episodes.

  His doctorate led to a stint as a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. At fourteen and a half he became the youngest person to date to receive the Stevenson Award. He has also appeared on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. Today he does research at Caltech, though the boy in Young Sheldon said he could never live in California because of its carefree lifestyle.

  Sheldon's own claims are bigger still. He cites an IQ of 187 and insists that ordinary tests cannot measure it. He says he has an eidetic memory, although his recall of his own life is closer to hyperthymesia. He first claimed a master's degree and two doctorates, but the list has since grown.

  The subjects he commands run from spectroscopy, pharmacology and zoology to cryptography, linguistics and railroad engineering. He hosts a web show called Fun With Flags about vexillology, the study of flags, and he is a devoted fan of model trains. He is fluent in Klingon and knows some Swedish, Finnish, Mandarin and Hindi. Young Sheldon shows him proficient in Spanish, a skill that has faded by the original series.

  Sheldon plays the piano, as does Parsons in real life. He also plays the theremin, an instrument Parsons learned too, and he can sing with perfect pitch.

  Sheldon also has synesthesia, a blending of the senses. He describes prime numbers as red, and twin primes as pink and smelling like gasoline. Fudgesicles, he says, taste like the speed of light.

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• 5. Rituals and Rules

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  Before entering an occupied room, such as a bathroom, Sheldon knocks three times, says the person's name, and repeats the whole sequence three times. Amy points to this as a sign of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The habit began when he was thirteen, after he apparently walked in on his father with another woman, though it was only his mother roleplaying. His explanation is blunt. "The first knock is traditional, but 'two' and 'three' are for people to get their pants on."

  When Penny once told him to sit anywhere in her home, Sheldon answered, "Oh, no, if only it were that simple!" He must choose the proper seat first. Only his mother and Bernadette, both strongly maternal, have shown they can order him around.

  Sheldon has mysophobia, a fear of germs, which makes his rare hugs painful to watch. He also has hemophobia, a fear of blood. He struggles to keep a secret, to be interrupted, or to hear people argue. He is also a notary public. He uses his knowledge of contracts to his own advantage, but a legal challenge he cannot defend distresses him.

  Sheldon often wears vintage T-shirts with superhero logos, and his comics are mostly from the DC Universe. One shirt carries the number 73. In the episode "The Alien Parasite Hypothesis", he explains that 73 is his favorite number. It is the 21st prime. Its mirror, 37, is the 12th prime, and the mirror of 12 is 21, which is 7 times 3. In binary, 73 is 1001001, a palindrome.

  He follows his jokes with the catchphrase "Bazinga!", now an officially registered trademark of Warner Bros. He also dislikes gifts. In his view, social convention turns a gift into a debt or burden that lasts until one person in the exchange dies.

  Sheldon takes no drugs, not even legal ones such as caffeine, because of a promise to his mother. He is hypersensitive when he swallows them by accident. Coffee or energy drinks make him hyperactive and erratic, usually when a deadline forces late work. Alcohol loosens him. He has sung aloud, mooned an audience, confronted Wil Wheaton, left inappropriate voicemails for Stephen Hawking, and affectionately slapped Amy's rear.

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• 6. Friends and Enemies

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  For the first ten seasons of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon shares an apartment with Leonard Hofstadter, played by Johnny Galecki. Their circle also includes Howard Wolowitz, played by Simon Helberg, and Rajesh Koothrappali, played by Kunal Nayyar. Sheldon belittles Leonard's work, yet he names him as his best friend. Leonard calls the bond dysfunctional, and people often mistake it for a romance. Living together means each knows the other's bathroom habits and schedules.

  In the season 8 episode "The Space Probe Disintegration", Sheldon tearfully admits to Leonard how hard he is to live with. He thanks him. Leonard breaks down beside him. Prady observed that Leonard's loyalty, despite everything, "reminds us of Sheldon's essential humanity".

  Howard holds only a master's degree in engineering, and Sheldon argues that this marks a lesser mind than his doctoral friends. Even so, he has called Howard a "treasured acquaintance" and later a friend. Bernadette offers her own theory of Sheldon's meanness. She says the part of his brain that knows cruelty is wrong is "getting a wedgie from the rest of his brain".

  Sheldon can manage only a limited number of friends at once, yet he comes to accept Bernadette and Amy into the group. In season 6, the friends ask whether comic book store owner Stuart can join them while Howard is in space.

  Penny is no scientist and shares few of the group's interests. She and Sheldon fight constantly in the early episodes, yet they become close friends. He lends her money without expecting it back and drives her to the hospital when she dislocates her shoulder. In "The Decoupling Fluctuation", Amy secretly tells him that Penny may leave Leonard. Sheldon wakes Penny in the night and asks her not to hurt his friend. Some fans wanted Sheldon and Penny to become a couple. Lorre disagreed. "We've stumbled into creating a character who has chosen a lifestyle for himself that is unique. And I don't see any reason to modify it."

  As a boy, Sheldon idolized Wesley Crusher, a fictional prodigy from Star Trek: The Next Generation played by Wil Wheaton. In 1995 Sheldon rode a bus for 15 hours to a convention, breaking his rule against urinating in a moving vehicle, but Wheaton never showed. Wheaton became number six on Sheldon's mortal enemy list, which Sheldon began at age nine on a 5¼-inch floppy disk. His coworkers Barry Kripke and Leslie Winkle are on it too.

  Wheaton later patched things up. Then he lost his spot to Brent Spiner, who took a signed Wesley Crusher figure out of its packaging after presenting it to Sheldon. In the season 11 episode "The Proton Regeneration", Sheldon and Wheaton compete for the lead in an internet reboot of Professor Proton. That was Sheldon's favorite childhood science show. Wheaton wins the part. Sheldon watches him play it well and, on Howard's advice, apologizes.

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• 7. Amy Farrah Fowler

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  In the season 3 finale, Howard and Raj blackmail Sheldon into meeting Amy Farrah Fowler, played by Mayim Bialik. A dating website had matched the two. Sheldon makes rude remarks about the website, and Amy agrees with him. He warms to her, especially when she says physical contact is off the table.

  In season 4, Sheldon keeps insisting that Amy is "a girl who is a friend, but is not my girlfriend". They invent intellectual games together. In season 5, Leonard carelessly implies that he and Amy may have slept together, and Sheldon karate-chops his neck, saying, "She is not for you... not for you!" Later Sheldon formally asks Amy to be his girlfriend, in "The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition". As they watch Howard launched into space in that season's finale, Sheldon takes her hand for support.

  In "The Cooper/Kripke Inversion", Sheldon admits to Penny and Leonard that a physical relationship with Amy is possible. He says being touched is something he is working on. Amy gives him a consoling hug that he seems to need. In season 7, he kisses her passionately for the first time. He starts out proving a point, then prolongs the kiss.

  In the season 8 episode "The Prom Equivalency", Sheldon finally says: "I love you too. There's no denying I have feelings for you that can't be explained in any other way. I briefly considered I had a brain parasite, but that seems even more far-fetched. The only conclusion was love." The season finale, "The Commitment Determination", brings a fight over the meaning of commitment, and Amy asks for a break. Sheldon, numb, reveals he had planned to propose with his grandmother's ring, a family heirloom.

  In the season 9 premiere, Sheldon pushes Amy to decide about their relationship and goes too far, insulting her. She ends it for good. When Barry Kripke hints at asking her out, Sheldon challenges him to a duel that will end three years later. After a Thanksgiving at an aquarium, Amy offers to get back together, but Sheldon only wants friendship. He tells her: "I excel at many things, but getting over you wasn't one of them."

  In "The Earworm Reverberation", Sheldon realizes the song stuck in his head is about Amy. He rushes to her apartment. There he finds her on a date with a man named Dave, who admires Sheldon's intellect and urges the two to kiss. They reunite. In the next episode Sheldon skips a screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens with his friends to celebrate Amy's birthday. Penny and Bernadette help him decide on a gift, and the couple become intimate for the first time that day.

  In season 10, Sheldon and Amy try a five-week experiment in living together, and it works well enough that they stay. Sheldon moves across the hall into Penny's old apartment. In "The Holiday Summation", Mary Cooper admits she accepted the arrangement only because she believed Sheldon would never be in a relationship. This deeply offends him. In the tenth-season finale, he unexpectedly proposes to Amy after Ramona Nowitzki, a graduate student who had long been infatuated with him, kisses him. Amy accepts in the eleventh-season premiere, and they marry in that season's finale.

  In the series finale, Sheldon and Amy win the Nobel Prize in Physics. It honors their discovery of super asymmetry, which they first worked on moments before their wedding. Amy uses her speech to encourage girls around the world to study whatever they want. Sheldon skips the self-centered speech and thanks his family, his friends and Amy. He calls Howard "Astronaut Howard Wolowitz", showing pride in that friend for the first time. He also agrees with what Leonard said in the pilot, that Leonard and Penny's children will be "smart and beautiful".

  Late in season 12, Amy prepares Sheldon for the idea of children by getting him to enjoy experimenting with the Wolowitz children. Earlier he had floated an unfeasibly large number of children, to serve as subjects in social and behavioral experiments. Young Sheldon later reveals a son named Leonard, in the season 4 episode "Graduation". Sheldon wanted to call him Leonard Nimoy Cooper, but Amy objected. The Young Sheldon finale adds an unnamed daughter. Both children have interests far from their father's: the boy likes ice hockey, the girl acting, much to Sheldon's chagrin.

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• 8. Acclaim and Debate

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  Critics and fans often name Parsons' portrayal as the main reason the show succeeded. James Chamberlin of IGN was direct. "It's hard to imagine what The Big Bang Theory would be if it weren't for Jim Parsons' great portrayal of Sheldon Cooper". Matt Roush of TV Guide said "there's a spark of divine inspiration in Jim Parsons' uproarious Sheldon Cooper". Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly wrote that "Parsons is doing something rare on network TV: making intellectualism admirable, even heroic".

  On the 1st of August 2009, Parsons won the TCA Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy. He won his first Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series on the 29th of August 2010. The Golden Globe followed on the 16th of January 2011, presented by his co-star Kaley Cuoco. In June 2011 he won the first Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series. He won back-to-back Emmys in 2010-11 and again in 2013-14, four in five years. That total ties him with Carroll O'Connor, Kelsey Grammer and Michael J. Fox.

  The character has also left his name on the natural world. Asteroid 246247 is called Sheldoncooper. In 2012, a newly discovered bee species was named Euglossa bazinga. In March 2013, the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium named a black-and-white colobus after him. In 2015, a new echinocaridid phyllocaridan from the Lower Devonian of central-eastern Poland became Ptychocaris sheldoni.

  Some viewers believe Sheldon's behavior fits what used to be called Asperger's syndrome, a part of the autism spectrum. The writers call his actions "Sheldony" and say they did not base him on it. Prady put it this way. "We write the character as the character. A lot of people see various things in him and make the connections. Our feeling is that Sheldon's mother never got a diagnosis, so we don't have one." He told Alan Sepinwall of the New Jersey Star-Ledger that he was uncomfortable labeling Sheldon.

  Parsons noted the writers' position but added that, in his opinion, Sheldon shows about as many traits of Asperger's as a character could. He read John Elder Robison's 2007 memoir Look Me in the Eye, which describes life with Asperger syndrome. Most of it, he said, touched on aspects of Sheldon. He added that Sheldon's brain is so focused on intellectual topics that the autism guess is an easy leap for viewers.

  Mayim Bialik, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, discussed the theory with Neil deGrasse Tyson on StarTalk. She said all the characters are in theory somewhere on the neuropsychiatric spectrum, and that Sheldon is often discussed in terms of Asperger's or OCD. His germ fears, his numbers and his precision all echo OCD, she said. She said the show portrays people who were likely teased and mocked. Yet they have successful careers, social lives built around Dungeons and Dragons and video games, and satisfying relationships.

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