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A boffin is a stock character in United Kingdom culture: a scientist, engineer, or other person engaged in technical or scientific research. The original World War II conception of war-winning researchers means that the character tends to have a more positive aspect than related characterisations.

Originally, the word was armed-forces slang for a technician or research scientist.[2] The origins and etymology of boffin are otherwise obscure. It has been variously proposed that:

The word comes from a name of a restaurant in East Anglia. From 1938 and during World War II, the British scientists developing radar frequented an eatery called Boffin’s.
Like sigint (signals intelligence), it was a six-character term popularized during WWII derived from “back office intelligence”, indicating the origins of a particular item of information.
It rhymes with puffin, a bird that is both serious and comical at the same time.
It was a word for older naval officers (over age thirty-two; see C. Graves, Life Line, 1941) who apparently were termed Boffins in the Royal Navy.
It was inspired by the Heath Robinson-esque appearance of the Blackburn Baffin aircraft of 1932.
It was derived from Nicodemus Boffin, a fictional character who appears in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, a dustman who is described there as a “very odd looking old fellow”. This theory was proposed by linguist Eric Partridge.

The word also made a few other appearances in literature prior to World War II. J.R.R. Tolkien used Boffin as a surname for a hobbit family in The Hobbit (1937), and a Sergeant Boffin appears in Mr. Bliss (written circa 1932). William Morris has a man called Boffin meet the newly-arrived time traveler in his novel News from Nowhere (1890).

— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin