Danica McKeller: Math Genius & TV Sweetheart

Her character might have been good at math but Danica McKeller, who played Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years, is a real life math genius! You have to watch this.

Danica still acts in some movies and television shows but spends most of her time writing math textbooks targeted at teenage girls.

She says it’s because she never thought she could be good at math because she didn’t fit into what she thought someone looked like. So she wants to change that image and help girls feel confident about doing math. Danica McKeller math books also aim to make math more fun.

As one reviewer says, “…She helped me incorporate daily life problems into math problems to solve.”

“When I was in the ninth grade, I remember studying geometry theorems and saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a theorem named after me?”

McKeller walks the walk too. She studied at UCLA and earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with highest honors, summa cum laude, in 1998, and even has a theorem named after herself!

As an undergraduate, she coauthored a scientific paper with Professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn entitled “Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{2}}.” Their results are termed the ‘Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem’.

I have absolutely no idea what that means but it sounds very math-ey. Maybe I need to read her books!