Beverly Hofstadter

Beverly Hofstadter, Ph.D., is Leonard's mother. Beverly is a neuroscientist as well as an award-winning psychiatrist and author.

Personality
Her personality is rather cold and, perhaps, influenced in part by her professional life, overly analytical. She tends to diagnose the behavior of neruoses of those she's speaking to. Her matter-of-fact analysis of Penny's relationship with her father prompts Penny to burst into tears. Rather than attempt to console Penny, Beverly merely continued to psychoanalyze her.

She diagnosed Raj with selective mutism and considered Raj and Howard's relationship to be an "ersatz homosexual marriage," often to their considerable discomfort. For example, her primary interest is making accomplishments in her fields. At times, she seems to see other humans as merely test subjects and will ask those she finds particularly interesting if they would be willing to have their brain scanned. While Leonard does not feel that his mother truly appreciates him, she takes a liking to Sheldon; whom she also tells more about what's happening to her than her own son (like in Season 3, after picking Beverly up from the airport, Sheldon asks if she liked the flowers he sent her after her carpal tunnel surgery which Leonard didn't even hear about).

Family and Relationships
As a by-product of her personality, Beverly's relationships with others tend to be non-traditional in nature.

Leonard Hofstader
Beverly's relationship with her son is decidedly unmaternal. She frequently critiques various aspects of his life utterly oblivious to the fact that she might be hurting his feelings, although she is perfectly aware of his childhood issues with her. Beverly mentioned at one point that Leonard's brother and sister are more successful than he is. Leonard's childhood with her can best be described as a series of neurological experiments. At one point Leonard indicates that he created a "hugging machine" in order to feel some sort of warmth and companionship. It is likely that she may have been more interested with Leonard as a test subject rather than her own child. Beverly made a brief appearance in The Skank Reflex Analysis via Sheldon's laptop to comfort Leonard and listened to his problems and simply told him to "buck up," then signed off. In return, Leonard strongly dislikes Beverly and blames a majority of his childhood issues on her.

Leonard's Siblings
Beverly noted at one point that her other children (Leonard's brother, Michael and his sister) are far more successful than Leonard both professionaly and personally. However, there is no indication that she feels any differently toward them on an emotional level, so she is just the same with them as she is with Leonard and wasn't proud of them, even though they both have successful careers. For example, when Howard asked her if she was proud of them because of their success, she said, "Why? They're not my accomplishments." And when Leonard remarks that she must be happy about her Michael's engagement to a sucessful young judge, Beverly replies "Why? I'm not marrying her."

Leonard's Father
We learn in the "The Maternal Congruence" that Beverly is divorcing Leonard's father, as he had an affair with a waitress from the Princeton university cafeteria. This is one of the few times we see anything resembling emotion from her as she indicates she "did feel something akin to grief and perhaps anger" and further characterized Mr Hofstader as a "loathsome son of a bitch". We also learn that they did not have a close romantic relationship with Beverly explaining that she had been responsible for her own orgasms since 1982 and only had intercourse for the purposes of reproduction (perhaps a root cause for Mr. Hofstader's affair?). He himself, also used to borrow Leonard's hugging machine to compensate for the lack of love too.

Sheldon Cooper
Between her neurotically strict speech patterns, lack of social conventions, and attention to detail, she is basically Sheldon's female equivalent, aside from Amy Farrah Fowler. Indeed, her inability to understand social conventions seems if anything to be somewhat more extreme and has to have some social concepts explained to her by, of all people, Sheldon (though his explanations typically reflect his own, at best, incomplete understanding). It is therefore unsuprising that Sheldon and Beverly share an odd non-romantic attraction to each other. They have a mutual interest in having their brain scanned and have even sang a duet of the Journey song "Any Way You Want It". However she did once kiss him passionately while intoxicated (declaring afterwards that she'd "rather have the busboy"). She apologized the following morning, and Sheldon accepted as she was intoxicated (he blamed Penny).

Trivia

 * Beverly has published multiple books, one such being called: Needy baby, Greedy baby.
 * Whenever having orgasms she says "yikes".