Professor Branestawm is a series of thirteen children's books written by the English author Norman Hunter. Professor Theophilus Branestawm is depicted throughout the books as the archetypal absent-minded professor and his name is a variant of the word "brainstorm". The first two books in the series were first published in the 1930s, but the other 11 appeared much later, from 1970 onwards.

The absent-minded professor is a stock character 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 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.