Danica McKellar
Danica McKellar
Danica Mae McKellaris an American actress, author, mathematician, and education advocate. She played Kevin Arnold's on-off girlfriend Winnie Cooper in the television series The Wonder Years, and later wrote four non-fiction books: Math Doesn't Suck, Kiss My Math, Hot X: Algebra Exposed and Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape, which encourage middle-school and high-school girls to have confidence and succeed in mathematics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actress
Date of Birth3 January 1975
CitySan Diego, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I want girls to feel the confidence you get from being smart.
I just love math and most people don't.
I learned my French through school. I was lucky in that the tutor on 'The Wonder Years' set spoke fluent French.
I played Winnie Cooper on 'The Wonder Years' from ages 12-18, and did a few other movies during some of the summers.
I was born in San Diego, and we moved to Los Angeles when I was seven. A couple of years later, I started acting!
Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.
I'll admit that I do quite like drinks that come in coconut shells. So there's always that.
There seems to be so much shame wrapped up in speech disabilities. It seems very sad and complicated all at the same time.
I've been just eating very healthy, all organic, no sugar, white flour, nothing artificial. I'm being so incredibly strict... not a lot of meat!
I went to about one frat party a year. A year seemed to be enough time for me to forget how much I didn't like frat parties, and my friends would eventually convince me to go to one. Cheap beer, guys looking for a quick hook-up, and girls playing 'dumb' to get in on the hook-up. I just never got into it.
I took a break from acting for four years to get a degree in mathematics at UCLA, and during that time I had the rare opportunity to actually do research as an undergraduate. And myself and two other people co-authored a new theorem: Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models on Two Dimensions, or Z2.
What I got which was unusual, especially as a child actress, was parents who believed that Hollywood was not that important. They told us education, family, health, all come first and they meant it.
I know we can't always know what medical surprises may happen during childbirth. But my hope is to go fully natural - no epidural, no interventions.
At the risk of being forgotten completely by the media, I went to college and pursued a passion that had nothing to do with acting: mathematics.