Sheldon Cooper

Sheldon Lee Cooper, B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D., is a fictional character and one of the protagonists in the 2007–2019 CBS television series The Big Bang Theory and its 2017–2024 spinoff series Young Sheldon, portrayed by actors Jim Parsons and Iain Armitage respectively (with Parsons as the latter series' narrator). For his portrayal, Parsons won four Primetime Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a TCA Award, and two Critics' Choice Television Awards. The character's childhood is the focus of Young Sheldon, in which he grows up as a child prodigy in East Texas with his family: Missy Cooper, George Cooper, Sr., George Cooper, Jr., Mary Cooper, and his grandmother, Connie Tucker.

The adult Sheldon is a senior theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and for the first ten seasons of The Big Bang Theory shares an apartment with his colleague and best friend, Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki); they are also friends and coworkers with Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and Rajesh Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar). In season 10, Sheldon moves across the hall with his girlfriend Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik), in the former apartment of Leonard's wife Penny (Kaley Cuoco).

He has a genius-level IQ of 187; however, he displays a fundamental lack of social skills, a tenuous understanding of humor, and difficulty recognizing irony and sarcasm in other people, although he himself often employs them. The antihero of the series, he exhibits highly idiosyncratic behaviour and a general lack of humility, empathy, and toleration. These characteristics provide the majority of the humor involving him, which are credited with making him the show's breakout character. Some viewers have asserted that Sheldon's personality is consistent with autism spectrum disorder (or what used to be classified as Asperger's Syndrome). Co-creator Bill Prady has stated that Sheldon's character was neither conceived nor developed with regard to Asperger's, although Parsons has said that in his opinion, Sheldon "couldn't display more facets" of Asperger's syndrome.