Danica McKellar

Danica Mae McKellar (1975 - ) American actress, mathematician and author.

As a child, McKellar landed the important rôle of Winnie Cooper on the TV show The Wonder Years. After that, she studied mathematics at UCLA, where she coauthored a paper on the “Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on ${\mathbb{Z}}^2$” for the Journal of Physics with Prof. Lincoln Chayes and a classmate, earning McKellar Erdős number (http://planetmath.org/ErdHosNumber) 4 through Chayes. After college, McKellar returned to television with a few recurring rôles on shows like The West Wing. As an actress, she is connected to Kevin Bacon through Marin Hinkle, who was with her in The Year That Trembled and with Bacon in Rails & Ties. She has written two bestselling books, Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail and Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss.