Danica McKellar

Danica McKellar

Danica McKellar 39820739

Danica Mae McKellar (born January 3, 1975) is an American actress, mathematics author and education advocate. She is best known for her role as Winnie Cooper in the television show The Wonder Years, and now as author of the two New York Times bestsellers, Math Doesn't Suck, and Kiss My Math, which encourage middle-school girls to learn math. Danica McKellar Icon_wink

Born in La Jolla, California, McKellar moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was eight. Her family is "a big mix of Western Europe." Her mother's ancestry is Portuguese via the Azores and Madeira islands and her father's ancestry is Scottish, French, German and Dutch. McKellar and sister Crystal McKellar both maintained professional acting careers as children, but with a strong emphasis on education as a priority. As a result, Crystal became a lawyer, and Danica majored in mathematics in college.

McKellar has admitted the transition from "child actor to adult actor was a little bumpy." Since leaving The Wonder Years, McKellar has had several guest roles in television series (including one with former co-star Fred Savage on Working, and has written and directed two short films. She briefly returned to regular television with a recurring role in the 2002–03 season of The West Wing, portraying Elsie Snuffin, the stepsister and assistant of Deputy White House Communications Director Will Bailey.
McKellar appeared in lingerie for a pictorial in the July 2005 edition of Stuff magazine after readers voted her the '90s star they would most like to see in lingerie. McKellar explained that she agreed to the shoot in part to obtain "grittier roles".
In June 2006, Lifetime Television announced that McKellar will star in a Lifetime movie and web-based series titled Inspector Mom about a mother who solves mysteries. In an interview in the November 17, 2006 issue of TV Guide, McKellar said that two TV movies and ten webisodes of Inspector Mom were being produced.
McKellar has provided the voices for two characters in three video games: Jubilee in X-Men Legends (2004), and Invisible Woman in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006) and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (2009).
On the August 1, 2007 edition of the Don and Mike Show, a WJFK-FM radio program out of Washington, D.C., McKellar announced plans that the producers of How I Met Your Mother were planning to bring her back for a recurring role (she guest-starred on the show in late 2005 in "The Pineapple Incident"). She appeared in the October 8, 2007, episode titled "Third Wheel".
In 2008, she starred in Heatstroke, a Sci-Fi Channel original movie about searching for alien life on Earth.
McKellar, as of June 23, 2008 (2008 -06-23), is one of the stars commenting on the occurrences of the new millennium in VH1's I Love the New Millennium, and as of 2009 is the math correspondent for Brink a program by the Science Channel about upcoming technology.

Mathematics

McKellar studied at UCLA, majoring in mathematics. While at UCLA, she became a member of Alpha Delta Pi sorority. She graduated summa cum laude in 1998. As an undergraduate, she coauthored a scientific paper with Professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn. Their results are termed the 'Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem'. Referring to the mathematical abilities of his student coauthors, Chayes was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "I thought that the two were really, really first-rate."

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