Danica McKellar Smarter Than Every Miss America Contestant

Danica McKellar is the beloved American actress best known for her role as Winnie Cooper in the TV series, The Wonder Years. As an adult actor she’s had a number of recurring roles — on The West Wing (Elsie Snuffin), How I Met Your Mother (Trudy), and she provides the voices of several cartoon characters including Hayley on Transformers: Rescue Bots, Becky on Phineas and Ferb, and M’gann on Young Justice. And then there was her superb performances on Dancing with the Stars in 2014.

What a lot of people don’t know about McKellar is that she’s a math geek. She graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with a BS in mathematics in June 1998. She’s a big-time STEM advocate particularly programs that focus on girls learning math. She’s written the books:

• Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail
• Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss
• Hot X: Algebra Exposed!
• Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape

You can learn more about McKellar’s role as co-author of the mathematical physics theorem, which bears her name (The Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem), here.