Howard Wolowitz

Howard Joel Wolowitz, M.Eng., is a Jewish engineer who lives with his mother and is the best friend of Rajesh Koothrappali. He often hangs out at Leonard and Sheldon's apartment. He has a Master's degree in Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but is usually ridiculed for lacking a doctorate, as opposed to his more distinguished friends. Fancying himself a smooth ladies' man, Howard is rather confident to try to woo girls (unlike the other three), mostly through creepy overtures and sometimes with his knowledge of languages, of which he knows six. As of The Herb Garden Germination, he is engaged to Bernadette.

Career
Howard Wolowitz is an Aerospace Engineer and faculty at Caltech's Department of Applied Physics. He has worked in the Astronautical Engineering lab at Caltech for three years as of the first season. He designed a satellite which is currently orbiting Jupiter's largest moon taking high-resolution digital photographs and remotely repairs satellites on a regular basis. He also troubleshoots space shuttle payloads, while some of the components he built are on the International Space Station, including a small payload support structure for a European science experimental package and the Wolowitz Programmable Hand designed for extravehicular repairs. NASA selected his team's design for a deep field space telescope that will be installed on the ISS, granting him the opportunity to fly aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket (set to launch from Kazakhstan in spring 2012) to observe its deployment on the space station as a payload specialist. He even performed a front end alignment from 62 million miles away when a Mars rover started pulling to the left and managed to get a Mars rover stuck in a ditch, only to have the data which it sent back from the crevice contain the first clear indications that there may have been life on Mars. However, as co-designer of the Pishkin-Wolowitz Liquid Waste Disposal System and designer of the (albeit flawed) Wolowitz Zero-Gravity Waste Disposal System for the International Space Station, he doesn't get much respect. Further, Howard is not credited for creating a stabilizing telescope camera mounting bracket for Raj and failed to make the team for the new Defense Department laser-equipped surveillance satellite since he was denied the requisite security clearance.

Characterization
Cheeky and supposedly suave, Howard is consistently depicted as the most sex-crazed of the guys. He provides outrageous pick-up lines whenever there is a female present. Howard describes himself as a romantic, although he usually comes across as overtly sexual and, in the words of Penny, disgusting. As part of his delusions regarding himself, he opines he is a "tender-hearted poet" and "crazy daredevil". He claims to appear confident and worldly, though he hesitantly admits he is not. One time, he developed a mathematical formula for the likelihood of him having sex by applying and modifying the Drake equation to include the "Wolowitz coefficient," which he defined as "neediness times dress size squared." He stated, "I'm a horny engineer,... I never joke about math or sex." Howard's techniques to approach women are varied, including magic and card tricks, ventriloquism, and techniques from the Mystery Method, such as peacocking and negging. His ideal woman is Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff, whom he often fantasizes about, but apparently every woman is his type.

Howard is a multi-lingual speaker whose many tongues he uses to impress the ladies, sadly to little avail. Most of the languages were revealed in only the matter of one episode; in revealed order, they are English, French, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, and Farsi. Wolowitz also speaks Klingon (and plays Klingon Boggle) as well as some Elvish, the fictional language created by J. R. R. Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings. It has been shown in The Wiggly Finger Catalyst that he also knows sign language. However, Wolowitz may not be as competent a polyglot as he believes. In The Dumpling Paradox, a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, referred to Wolowitz as "...your annoying little friend who thinks he speaks Mandarin." As evidence, he addressed Penny in Mandarin saying ("洗个痛快澡"! - Have a Good Shower!") spoken in the wrong tones. Another time, he addressed Penny in Russian, saying ("Ты очень красивая девушка" — "You are a very beautiful girl"), but had a bad pronunciation. On the contrary, he speaks his French in the appropriate manner without any speaking errors.

Once Howard finds a joke he likes, he sticks with it. Sheldon even describes him as the funny one in their group, while Howard has said of himself that he is quirky. He mimics voices such as Koothrappali and his pushy mother's strong accent, and often spews cultural stereotypes. He also uses slang such as "fo’shizzle to my nerdizzles," with his acknowledged street credit. Howard often has married-couple-like arguments with Rajesh, usually mocking Raj's words or covering for his obnoxiousness, and is the primary means by which Raj is heard whenever Penny is present. Very sensitive, Howard can be traumatized by a hurtful comment from a woman and there is a glimmer of goodness in him that he allowed Penny to see.

Wolowitz spends a large amount of time playing MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, where he plays a night elf hunter named Wolowizard with a pet tiger named Buttons, and Age of Conan where he is a Guardian named Sir Howard of Wolowitz. Howard enjoys (and is very decent at) DDR. He likes reading DC Comics, similar to his friends, and is a Dungeon Master. He has an entire closet of magic tricks. A model rocket enthusiast, Howard designed the engine himself for a three-stage rocket. His advancements in robotics include the Mobile Omnidirectional Neutralization and Termination Eradicator (MONTE) for the Southern California Robot Fighting League Round Robin Invitational. He one time sent a signal from his laptop through Apartment 4A's local ISP, racing down fiber-optic cable at the speed of light to San Francisco, bouncing off a satellite in geosynchronous orbit to Lisbon, Portugal, where the data packets were handed off to submerged transatlantic cables terminating in Halifax, Nova-Scotia, and transferred across the continent via microwave relays back to the ISP and the X10 receiver attached to Leonard and Sheldon's lamp to enable public access to turn the lights on and off just because he can.



He is asthmatic, allergic to peanuts and almonds, prone to seasickness, and has transient idiopathic arrhythmia. With only three-percent body fat, Howard has been said to be a "human chicken wing" by Raj, while Leonard has made a short joke about him, even though Leonard is only a quarter-inch taller than Howard, and Sheldon has called him a "tiny, tiny man." Howard sports a bowl-style haircut and wears loud, vintage, 1960-era outfits with a matching color scheme: a V-neck or tee shirt over a turtleneck or dickey with a variety of pins, Vans or Converse sneakers, and skinny pants with collectable belt buckles, often featuring superhero logos or a Nintendo controller. Howard's pajamas are silk gowns embroidered with his initials, " H W J ", befitting his bedroom containing satin sheets, remote-controlled romantic music, and mood lighting set by lightsabers overhanging his bed. His preferred mode of transportation is his Vespa motor scooter.

Family
Howard is noted for living with his overbearing Jewish mother (but to Howard she lives with him), who always makes his life miserable at home with her nosy nature as well as her barrage of questions, and apparently is oblivious to his accomplishments as a grown-up, usually treating him like he is still a child, thus filling the cliche of a Jewish mother. Never seen on-screen, she only communicates with Howard by yelling to him in an obnoxious manner, which results in awkward long-distance conversations, with Howard frustratedly yelling back at her. Such behavior prompts him to call her a "crazy old lady". Despite this, Howard likes to be mothered, has an unresolved Oedipal complex, and seems to appreciate his Mother's cooking, especially her brisket, a dish that Howard refers to throughout (unlike the turbriskefilte, a turkey stuffed with a brisket stuffed with gefilte fish, which he says he 'doesn't even chew' but 'swallows like pills'). In "The Precious Fragmentation", Howard reveals that his father left the family when Howard was eleven years old. To help Howard overcome this, his mom bought him an Alf doll to console Howard. Although it is not stated what really happened, Howard assumes that his father did not like him. In The Hot Troll Deviation, Howard infers that the distal cause of why he "tries too hard" with women is due to abandonment issues, as opposed to the proximal cause being his looks (as stated in The Killer Robot Instability): "I’m just another lonely nerd, living with his mother, trying to find any scrap of happiness he can. You know, maybe to make up for the fact that his dad left him when he was eleven." Howard lost his virginity to his second cousin Jeanie at Aunt Barbara's house in a Toyota Corolla during Uncle Murray's funeral, which Leonard and Raj find absolutely hilarious. He has cousins from Fort Lauderdale, while his Aunt Betty (his mother's sister) and Uncle Elliot are from Palm Springs. Howard also has an Uncle Louie, whom he ridicules based on a photo of him in a bathing suit. He says there are "Jewish hobbits," as evidenced by dinner at his house on Rosh Hashanah. After Howard's great-grandfather immigrated to the United States, he ran a little butcher shop on the Lower East Side of New York, ripping people off. Howard has said that his family is the history of heart disease.

Rajesh Koothrappali
Raj is Howard's best friend. Howard invites his buddy over to his house all the time, and Raj is essentially a Wolowitz. Howard has called them co-pilots of the Millenium Falcon, and they have weekly routines they do together. However, Howard becomes easily distracted and sometimes abandons him, only to be unmindful of any wrongdoing. Sadly, he taught Koothrappali his dance moves, and Howard seems to wear off on him, as Raj can be very womanizing and uses slang. He scoffs at Raj when he says something stupid, and has once complained that he's going to end up with swimmer's ear with Raj whispering in his ear, although Sheldon cannot tolerate his moist breath in his ear altogether. Despite the fact that Howard is undeniably obsessed with women, Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, Leonard's mother, says they are in an "ersatz homosexual marriage". Amusingly, Raj and Howard have several arguments during the series, in which Raj repeatedly accuses Howard of leaving him for everybody who's only slightly better looking and otherwise assuming the cliché female role in partnership arguments. Season 4 jokingly introduced the possibility of Howard's "latent homosexual tendencies" when George Takei appeared as himself in an imaginary conversation with Bernadette and Katee Sackhoff over his relationship status with Bernadette, but Howard quickly denied it. Before Howard met Bernadette, it was implied that he called Raj "honey", and Mrs. Wolowitz is relieved when he has a girl over to the house.

Leonard Hofstadter
Howard meets Leonard in The Staircase Implementation. Howard told Penny that both he and Raj liked Leonard. Leonard has helped him quite often, and Howard faced an allergic reaction partly to provide Leonard's first birthday party. Though, Howard finds Leonard's worries over Penny humorous sometimes, and they like to post embarrassing things about each other on Youtube and Twitter. The two of them made a pact that if either one of them ever got a girlfriend, the other one would set up the single guy with one of her girlfriends. But when it comes to agreements and women, they frequently fight.

Sheldon Cooper
Sheldon often makes fun of Howard for not having a doctoral degree and for being an engineer, referring to engineers as "noble semi-skilled laborers" and "the Oompa-Loompas of science", and calling engineering "the slow younger brother of physics". He has referred to their group of scientists as "a group of geniuses and their friend Howard", thus ruling him out, and called Howard "a treasured acquaintance" instead of a closest friend like the others. However, Sheldon still says that if he ever needs an apathetic tertiary friend, he is there for him, and refers to him as "the funny one" in their group. He even helped him in his work and showed dismay when Howard was distracted by Penny's friend Christy during Halo night. In the episode The Apology Insufficiency, Sheldon angers Howard by revealing details to the FBI that prevent him from obtaining a much needed security clearance. Howard refuses to accept Sheldon's apology, until Sheldon gives Howard his spot on the couch. Sheldon asks for the spot back after only 94 seconds. Though, often annoyed by Sheldon, Howard is able to perceive when Sheldon is upset, unlike with best friend Raj. Howard has varied between not really caring whether he and Sheldon are friends and being visibly wounded when Sheldon is dismissive of him. During the time when Sheldon considered who to jettison from his circle of friends and said critically that Howard doesn't have a Ph.D. and isn't available to play video games during the Jewish High Holidays, Howard seemed pleased that he might be freed from Sheldon's friendship, only to watch as Sheldon then ordered a horrified Raj out of the circle of friends. Later, the "treasured acquaintance" remark makes Howard's face fall as if hearing that Leonard, Penny and Raj are considered friends while he isn't, is upsetting to him.

Penny
Since the beginning of the series, Howard shows interest in Penny (in his words, a "cheesecake-scented goddess"), but the interest is primarily sexual and she always turns him down. Uncharacteristically, in The Middle Earth Paradigm, she thought it was so cute when he dressed as Peter Pan, but he was actually Robin Hood. In the beginning, Howard attempted to charm Penny with his linguistic prowess. He naively believes Penny is flirting with him when she rebukes his advances, e.g., Howard says, "See a Penny, pick her up, and all the day you'll have good luck," while Penny says, "No you won't." After one approach too many by Howard, Penny finally confronted him about how he treats women in The Killer Robot Instability. This greatly affected Howard and he fell into depression, missing work and staying home. When Penny went to apologize, Howard told her about his past relationships and Penny showed some sympathy for him, seeing him as a real human being for the first time. After her comforting words, regarding him a "nice guy" that she likes, Howard tried to kiss her, but she reacted and punched him in the face. With the situation resolved, Penny believed they had come to an "understanding", but Howard thought he was merely "half-way to pity sex" with her. Clearly, Penny commonly sees Howard as disgusting and inhuman. However, Penny's animosity toward Howard has mellowed somewhat since Howard began dating Penny's work colleague Bernadette Rostenkowski, to whom he is now engaged. Penny introduced them to each other, is very nosy about their relationship, and once questioned if Bernadette truly loves Howard. She thinks Howard's story about his father is extremely sad; Howard used this as leverage for Penny to help him get Bernadette back, after tricking her to open the door for whom she thought was Sheldon.

Romantic
Amongst his friends, Howard is the least successful at getting dates, despite his obsessive drive.

Christy Vanderbel
Through Penny, inadvertently, Howard hooked up with Christy, "the whore of Omaha." The two upset Penny by abusing her personal belongings, such as using her loofa mitt and getting her stuffed bear collection sweaty. Christy then had to stay with Howard at his house. Although she displayed signs of affection towards Howard, Christy was highly materialistic, and went out with him only on the condition he buy her stuff and take her shopping; this was more than fine with him. She dumped him when she confronted Howard's mother, who threatened to cut Howard out of the will, as long as he kept going out with her.

Leslie Winkle
Howard engaged in a "friends with benefits" relationship with Leslie Winkle, which brought him a few benefits beside sex including receiving a rapid prototyper and getting on the research trip to Geneva to check out the CERN Supercollider. However, he still became depressed when Leslie dumped him some time later. In order to cheer him up, Leonard and Raj took Howard to Las Vegas and managed to hire a prostitute for him.

Bernadette Rostenkowski
Main Article: Howard and Bernadette 

Howard's relationship with Bernadette is easily his most significant romantic relationship. Howard was introduced to Bernadette by Penny after he initiated the pact with Leonard in The Creepy Candy Coating Corollary. In The Herb Garden Germination, Howard proposed to Bernadette and she accepted.

Religion
Although Jewish, Howard is not very serious about his faith and does not keep kosher. For instance, he eats pork, and when the price of pork went up at the group's favorite Chinese restaurant, he remarked "it's getting tougher and tougher to be a bad Jew." On another occasion, when Howard tried to date Sheldon's sister, Missy, he said he would kill his rabbi with a pork chop if his religion was an impediment, and one of the reasons he was happy to continue dating Bernadette (who is Catholic) was the chance to really annoy his mom. Despite this, Howard has shown some belief in his faith. When he and Raj posed as goths to pick up women, he wore fake-tattoo sleeves and refused to get real ones so he could be buried in a Jewish cemetary. (Though, when it became apparent that the goth girl, Bethany, would only sleep with him if he got a tattoo, he was prepared to go through with it, but eventually refused due to the pain of the process.) He also apparently attends High Holiday services, as Sheldon once critically noted that he was not available to compete in Halo during those times.

Trivia

 * Howard thinks that when Penny rejects him that she is actually flirting with him.
 * He is the only one of the group, other than Penny, to lack a Ph.D. He is sometimes mocked by Sheldon and others for this.
 * Howard has a master’s degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It required the completion of 144 units of grad work and an original thesis.
 * According to Caltech benefactor Mrs. Latham, he "couldn't stick with it long enough to get his Ph.D." and is simply a "space plumber".
 * Howard has a different chest hair count in "The Cushion Saturation" and "The 21-Second Excitation".
 * Howard wears alien pins on his collar in every episode.
 * Even though Howard is Jewish, like Raj, Wolowitz does not seem to take his faith seriously and hardly keeps Kosher.
 * Howard wears Vans and Converse.
 * Wolowitz is a huge fan of Stephen Hawking and likes to watch tapes of his lectures, preferably ones prior to 1985, " before he became a 'creepy' computer voice" (Hawking lost his voice due to a tracheotomy performed after a life-threatening bout of pneumonia and now communicates using a voice synthesizer).
 * Wolowitz spends a large amount of time playing MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, where he plays a night elf hunter named Wolowizard with a pet tiger named Buttons. And Age of Conan where he is a Guardian named Sir Howard of Wolowitz.
 * Howard enjoys (and is very decent at) DDR.
 * Howard is allergic to peanuts and when he does eat one, his face goes pink and swells up very badly.
 * Howard owns an Alienware computer.
 * Howard has a Dell XPS M1210 with a 6 Cell Battery.
 * Howard owns a Motorola V3, Nokia N95 and various iPhone cellphones.
 * Howard's personal wardrobe and grooming styles are based on Davy Jones from The Monkees, usually including a 1960s hip bowl-style haircut (even though he chose to have a '70s disco style afro and goat beard 7 years ago) and a brightly colored shirt.
 * Howard can beatbox, albeit badly.
 * The character is named after show producer Bill Prady's former business partner in a software development company, Howard Wolowitz.
 * Howard's mother, played by Carol Ann Susi, threatened to take Howard out of the will as long as "the whore of Omaha", was around, Penny's friend Christy.
 * Howard lives with his mother, though he maintains that his mother lives with him.
 * Howard gets around Pasadena by means of gas-powered scooter with a basket on the front although he may have gotten a car because in the Robotic manipulation he states that he smuggled the robotic arm to his car.
 * Howard sports a number of belt buckles, including a chimpanzee, deli sandwich, a film projector, Nintendo controller and the 'Superman Returns' shield. Many of his belt buckles are purchased from thealley.com
 * Howard has transient idiopathic arrhythmia, which causes him to have an irregular heartbeat.
 * Howard sang "Baby Baby Don't Get Hooked on Me" in the car on the way to a "great little sushi place that has karaoke."
 * Howard does not seem loyal to his Jewish faith, as it is revealed that he is only eating kosher at High Holy days; although he did say he wouldn't get a real tattoo so he could be buried in a Jewish cemetery.
 * Howard is at least part inventor in the defective "Zero Gravity Waste Disposal System" on the ISS and uses his mother's meatloaf to test it.
 * Howard plays the drums on Rock Band.
 * Howard mentions to Bernadette that he lost his virginity in a Toyota Corolla. He later confesses to the gang that he lost his virginity to his second cousin, Jeanie, whom he met at his Aunt Barbara's house shortly after his uncle Murray's funeral.
 * We have never seen Howard's mother so far, but have heard her a great deal.
 * Howard once went to medical school, but dropped out because he easily gets nauseated when he sees injuries (as seen in The White Asparagus Triangulation when he appears sick when he sees stitches on Leonard's hand).
 * Howard says in "The Friendship Algorithm" that he's thinking about growing a mustache but it's not until The Electric Can Opener Fluctuation he appears with one, having grown a massive beard at the North Pole and keeping the mustache when they shave their beards off.
 * According to "The Apology Insufficiency", his middle name is Joel.
 * Howard has 3% body fat (Raj says he looks like "a human chicken wing" when he's at the beach).
 * In "The Alien Parasite Hypothesis", Howard mentions having taken a karate lesson when he was 11. He claims that he could have become more proficient if his mother could have arranged a carpool.
 * Howard is no longer a ladies man as he now has a girlfriend and recently made fiance, Bernadette.
 * Like a common nerd, Howard was bullied as a child. He received the common treatment of wedgies and swirlies.
 * He weighs either 97 or 108 pounds.
 * Howard's online username/persona/identity is Wolowizard.
 * His nightmare is to shower after the game and to other guys see him naked.
 * It also appears that he is left handed, as he uses the fork in the right hand and the knife in his left while eating pancakes at the end of The Pulled Groin Extrapolation. It is unknown whether the actor playing him, Simon Helberg, is left handed.

Phrases Howard has used to hit on women, mainly Penny:
 * "See a Penny, pick her up, and all the day you'll have good luck."
 * (Howard was dressed as Robin Hood on Halloween but everyone thought he was Peter Pan:) "I got a lot of fairy dust with your name on it."
 * (Trying to hit on Summer Glau, an actress in Firefly as well as The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Raj later stole this line to use himself) "It's hot in here; it must be Summer."
 * "Are you from Mars? Because your ass is out of this world."
 * "Your ass must be jelly, because jam doesn't shake like that."
 * "If that's a working stethoscope, then maybe you'd like to hear my heart skip a beat."
 * He has also called Penny a "cheesecake-scented goddess".