Posted on 07/22/2005 12:02:04 PM PDT by GreenLanternCorps
On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series "The Wonder Years," takes on questions that require more than a moment's thought to answer.
"If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself," one fan asked recently, "and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?"
"This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."
Ms. McKellar, now a semiregular on "The West Wing" playing a White House speechwriter, Elsie Snuffin, is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.
Her mathematics knowledge extends well beyond calculus. As a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, she also took more esoteric classes, the ones with names like "complex analysis" and "real analysis," and she pondered making a career move to professional mathematician.
"I love that stuff," Ms. McKellar said last month during a visit to Manhattan after a play-reading in the Hamptons. Her conversation was peppered with terminology like "epsilons" and "limsups" (pronounced "lim soups").
"I love continuous functions and proving if functions are continuous or not," she said.
She may also be the only actress, now or ever, to prove a new mathematical theorem, one that bears her name. Certainly, she is the only theorem prover who appears wearing black lingerie in the July issue of Stuff magazine. Even in that interview, she mentioned math.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
She has an Master's Degree in Mathemathtics I believe.
Thought you'd be interested.
I feel the stange need to bookmark this thread for no apparent reason...
You're probably thinking of Mayim Bialik (AKA "Blossom", form the series of the same name) Pursued a Ph.D. in neuroscience at UCLA.
"This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."
Headline: Actress can do high-school math.
Golly, if only my math teachers looked like that when I was in high school!
I think it is just a Batchelor's but the theorem was graduate level work.
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
she looks hot and Fred Savage looks weird now......
Don't be too quick to scoff -- a *lot* of high-schoolers (probably a large majority) couldn't solve that problem.
Why did parents find it necessary to inflict those horrible glasses on their offspring? Even with the glasses she's cute.
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
Our high school librarian looked like that (albeit blonde). Luckily I was a nerd anyway and didn't mind spending a lot of time in the library.
Solving the equations is the easy part, it's figuring out which equations to use to solve a problem that is the trick.
*swoon*
The fact that she's also a major babe is just icing on the cake.
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