What is the name of Leonard Hofstadter's mother?

Leonard Hofstadter's mother is named Beverly Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory. She is played by Christine Baranski and is introduced as a highly accomplished psychiatrist and neuroscientist.

Beverly's professional expertise is matched by her emotionally distant, analytical personality. She often treats family relationships as subjects for observation, which helps explain Leonard's long-running frustration with her lack of warmth. The show reveals that she raised him with unusually strict expectations and compared him unfavorably with his accomplished siblings.

Beverly first appears in the second-season episode “The Maternal Capacitance,” when she visits Leonard and immediately forms an unexpectedly comfortable rapport with Sheldon. Her similarity to Sheldon—in speech patterns, bluntness, intellectual pride, and disregard for social conventions—becomes a recurring joke.

Leonard's father is Alfred Hofstadter, an anthropologist, so Beverly's scientific background is not unique in the family. She is sometimes confused with Mary Cooper, Sheldon's mother, or Connie Tucker, Sheldon's grandmother. Beverly is also distinct from Debbie Wolowitz, Howard's mother, who is heard frequently but is not Leonard's parent.