James Wolfowitz

James L. Wolfowitz, M.Eng., is a Jewish aerospace engineer and ex-astronaut. He is the son of an overbearing mother, Debbie Wolfowitz, who cares very little about his scientific accomplishments and still talks to him as if he were a child and his dad who left him and his mother. As the best friend of Vikram Singh Barn, he often hangs out at Lewis and Thomas's apartment with him and the rest of the Sidemen. Though he's the only member of the group lacking a doctoral degree, he defends himself by pointing out that he not only has a master's degree in Engineering, but also designs important inventions like the "space toilet" and telescope used at the International Space Station and components for satellites and space probes. 
== Biography ==
=== Early life ===
James was born in East London in November 7, 1995 to Sam and Debbie Wolfowitz. When James was in kindergarten, his mother made him wear rubber gloves there so he wouldn't pick up a disease from the other children. When James was 11, his father left for an unknown reason and James spent his adolescence looking out of the window waiting for him to return one day, but he never did. James's childhood was not only lonely, but he was also bullied back then, with one of his bullies being Scott Kaminski.
=== Season 1 ===
=== Season 2 ===
=== Season 3 ===
=== Season 4 ===
=== Season 5 ===
=== Season 6 ===
=== Season 7 ===
=== Season 8 ===
=== Season 9 ===
=== Season 10 ===
=== Season 11 ===
=== Season 12 ===
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== Career ==
James is an aerospace engineer. He has worked in the astronautical engineering lab for three years as of the first season. He began working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Operations Center prior to the series, and he has his own mechanical engineering lab. Howard designed a satellite which is orbited 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. 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.
== Personality ==
James has an extremely perverted and provocative nature, is a user of women, a wannabe ladies man, womanizer and lady killer. Throughout the first three seasons, James has been shown to be madly in lust with Penny. However, all of his attempts to get her attention have failed, usually foiled by Lewis. He is consistently depicted as the most sex-crazed of the Sidemen, though he doesn't think his sexual behaviour is any different from others. One time, he developed a mathematical formula for the likelihood of him having sex by applying and modifying the Drake equation to include the "Wolfowitz coefficient," which he defined as "neediness times dress size squared." He stated, "I'm a horny engineer... I never joke about math or sex." He often fantasizes about several actresses, including Kate Sackhoff, but apparently every woman is his type. James describes himself as a romantic, although he usually comes across as overtly sexual and sometimes, in Penny's words, disgusting.
He also does not seem to care exactly what he has sex with as long as it's a girl and he's happy as in "Barely Legal" in which a giraffe starts to lick him before he realized what was happening and he then chased it away because it wasn't the same giraffe from the previous night. However, in "The Thin White Line", Brian detects that he recently had sex with two women and a man. Although Brian does detects the scent of a man whom Quagmire had sex with, Quagmire corrects Brian that he had sex with "Three Filipino women" only to realize that the third was a transsexual. This realization prompts James to run and cry at the horror of having sex with a transsexual woman.
He once said that if he could be with any woman in the world, he would choose Taylor Hanson, not realizing that Taylor Hanson is actually a guy.
James's habit of unprotected sex may explain why he has multiple sexually-transmitted diseases, which he notes in "Halloween on Spooner Street". However, during a marathon sex encounter with a woman from the dating site Tinder in "The Dating Game", James starts out using condoms but abandons them after a time.
James is multilingual, using many tongues to try to impress the ladies, and in most cases it works 50% of time. Most of the languages were revealed in the pilot; in revealed order, they are English, French, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic and Farsi. James also speaks Klingon (and plays Klingon Boggle). As shown in "The Wiggly Finger Catalyst", he also knows sign language, and in "The Hawking Excitation", he speaks Japanese and Binary-coded ASCII. However, James may not be as competent a polyglot as he believes. In The owner of Szechuan Palace referred to James 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 used bad pronunciation. Thomas also corrected him in "The Hawking Excitation"," when James made a mistake in binary. On the contrary, he speaks his French without any speaking errors.
At a cost of his alleged suaveness, James can be obnoxious, flippantly derisive and arrogant to an extreme: before he met Bernadette, he made a constant habit of mocking and belittling Lewis about his relationship with Penny as if it had no chance of progressing, completely ignoring the fact that he himself was not in a relationship for the sake of seeming superior to somebody else. Also, when he makes any an accomplishment that he can lord over other people, he will relentlessly remind people about it - most commonly, he brags about having been to space and being the designer for technology that boarded the International Space Station. This particular factor goes to such an extent that people find his bragging extremely annoying and gratuitous, but he barely seems to notice how incessantly he is talking about it. This mostly stemmed from the belief that going into space would be the greatest accomplishment he will ever achieve, and not being able to discuss it would, in his opinion, downgrade its value to him. In spite of this, James seemed to believe that simply being an astronaut who went to space made him an American hero.
In addition, after he met Bernadette, he first started treating her like a house-wife and when she stated it felt like it wasn't her house, he answered Of course it's your house. Why else would you be cleaning it all the time? and expects her to cater to him in the same way his mother did. He even shamelessly admitted that he'd hoped that, when he met a girl, she would be more like Megan Fox from Transformers (Who is an extremely attractive, but notoriously objectified person, indicating a slightly male-chauvinistic streak). He also tended to act extremely childishly, being lazy enough that Bernadette even set up a 'chore chart' for every time he helped around the house, but even then he only did the bare minimum of housework and expected Bernadette to do it instead. Where his father Sam Wolowitz is concerned, Howard has an extremely complex attitude and opinion. He is repeatedly shown to be furious and resentful towards his father for abandoning him to live with his mother, which is understandable. When he discovers a letter from his father and learns that Sheldon had prematurely read it, his ultimate reaction is to burn the letter cause he doesn't want to hear anything that his father has to say, but he is even angrier when he becomes the only one who has no idea what was in the letter. 
Once James 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 Raj's Indian accent and his mother's accent, and often spews cultural stereotypes. He uses slang such as "fo’shizzle to my nerdizzles," demonstrating his supposed street cred. Howard often has married-couple-like arguments with Raj, usually mocking his 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. In fairness, when this actually happened with Penny, he entirely deserved it because he was making insensitive, borderline misogynistic suggestions towards her and had done so at multiple opportunities in the past, and couldn't even notice that he was being conceited and insulting towards her. Howard's questionable insensitivity has also had violent consequences - when Penny engaged in a ferocious fight with Alicia, Howard screamed with excitement at seeing a girl-fight and immediately restrained Leonard out of terror that he would try to break it up - the fight resulted in Penny receiving several brutal injuries and Howard never had the decency to apologize for his part in her injuries, yet he said something to please her.
== Physical Appearance ==
James is a short, thin man, originally in his early-twenties, but he's in his late-twenties by now. He is 5' 4" (1.63 m) (one inch shorter than Lewis) with brown hair and blue eyes.
He sports a bowl 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 pin in the shape of an aliens head, on the neck, Vans or Converse sneakers and skinny pants with collectible belt buckles, often being a reference to geek culture, though he only owns one belt. 
== Family ==
== Relationships ==
=== Friends ===
=== Romantic ===
== Religion ==
In an episode of StarTalk podcast, the show's co-creator and executive producer Bill Prady said, “Howard is culturally religious. Jews are well represented among scientists because of a cultural predisposition toward academic careers, so here's a character whose religion is cultural for him, but not particularly significant.” Although Jewish, Howard is not very serious about his faith and does not keep kosher. For instance, he eats pork often and without regret; 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." He is not at all concerned about postponing sex until wedlock (like every other religious character on the show, except for Sheldon's parents). 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 these actions, 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 cemetery. He also apparently attends High Holiday services, as Sheldon once critically noted that he was not available to compete in Halo during those times. Howard scared away his mother's boyfriend during a very vindictive bar mitzvah speech.
== Trivia ==