The Absent-Minded Professor The Absent-Minded Professor The Absent-Minded Professor is a 1961 American comic science fiction family film produced by Walt Disney Productions based on the short story "A Situation of Gravity" by Samuel W. Taylor. The title character was based in part on Hubert Alyea, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Princeton University, who was known as "Dr. Boom" for his explosive demonstrations. The film stars Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard. The film was a huge success at the box-office, and two years later became the first Disney film to have a sequel, 1963's "Son of Flubber". The original 1961 film
William Brainard William Brainard William C. "Bill" Brainard (born 1935) is an American economist. He is the Arthur Okun Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University, and he served as the provost of the university from 1981 to 1986. Brainard is the namesake of the William C. Brainard chair, which current Yale provost Ben Polak holds. Brainard earned both his economics M.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1963) at Yale. He has been teaching at Yale since 1962. Along with his frequent collaborator James Tobin, Brainard developed the theory of Tobin's q. The concept first appeared in Brainard and Tobin's 1968 article "Pitfalls in