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 Yes, it's true! Danica McKellar, best known for playing Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, is this week's "Woman of the Week." For those of us who grew up with this television show playing in our living rooms, we hoped that Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper would get together. Eventually, they did (although they didn't stay together), and the series ended. Still, the end of the TV series signaled the beginning of a new career for Danica McKellar - a career in math.
Danica McKellar studied mathematics at UCLA and graduated summa cum laude in 1998. As an undergraduate, McKellar co-authored an important scientific paper with her professor and a fellow student. This paper, which proved a theorem, was titled "Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin–Teller models on Z2".
McKellar's paper makes her one of the few people to have an Erdős – Bacon number. An Erdős-Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number, which measures "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős; and one's Bacon number, which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.
More recently, Danica McKellar has launched the website http://www.danicamckellar.com/, where she offers free math tutoring to students in grades K-8. McKellar is also the national spokesperson for St. Jude's "Math-a-thon", which raises money for St. Judes' cancer research and treatment. Additionally, she has published a book, available in August 2007, called "Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail." According to McKellar, she wrote the book "to show girls that math is accessible and relevant, and even a little glamorous."
Resources:
http://www.danicamckellar.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danica_McKellar
http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/07/interview_with_math_whiz_autho.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonder_Years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s-Bacon_number
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