Absent-minded professor

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.

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.

The archetype 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.

[1] Thomas Aquinas,[2] Isaac Newton,[3] Adam Smith, André-Marie Ampère, Jacques Hadamard, Sewall Wright, Nikola Tesla, Norbert Wiener, Archimedes, Pierre Curie[4] and Albert Einstein[3] were all scholars considered to be absent-minded – their attention absorbed by their academic studies.

Examples of this include the characterisation of Merlin in The Sword in the Stone (particularly in the Disney adaptation) and Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series.

Per Lindroth [ sv ] , 1929, Den tankspridde professorn ( The Thoughtful Professor )
" The Astrologer who Fell into a Well " – John Tenniel's illustration from an 1884 edition of Aesop's fables, based on a story about Thales of Miletus