Rajesh Ramayan Koothrappali is Wolowitz's best friend and yet another genius. He is Indian, albeit he despises Indian food (as seen in The Luminous Fish Effect and in The Dumpling Paradox) and culture. He has a thick Indian accent and, like Wolowitz, a love for Stephen Hawking. He works in the Physics department at Caltech, where his area of expertise is particle astrophysics. For his discovery of a planetary object beyond the Kuiper Belt (which he named "Planet Bollywood") he was included in People magazine's "30 Under 30" to watch, and thus received a larger office for his work, granting him some form of celebrity status. However, the work Raj performs at the University is repetitive enough that he could conceivably get replaced by a simple software program...(more)