Alter Ego
Proof of Success
Former child star Danica McKellar wants to show young students how to shine at math.
by J. Rentilly
The number of tabloid pages devoted to child actors who have scandalously crashed and burned after youthful success is somewhere near infinity. But Danica McKellar, best known for setting hearts aflutter as Winnie Cooper in the hit TV show The Wonder Years, avoided such a fate by immersing herself in a discipline that’s based on the concept of infinity: mathematics.
After the cancellation of The Wonder Years on the eve of McKellar’s 18th birthday, the young actress enrolled at UCLA, where she intended to distance herself from Hollywood. “I felt it was really important, after spending six years on a TV show being called by a name that wasn’t my own, to find out who I really was,” says McKellar, whose recent credits include The West Wing and How I Met Your Mother. “Math gave me the answers to my life.”
McKellar flourished at UCLA. The dedicated scholar co-authored a paper with a fellow student and a professor to prove a new mathematic principle eventually named the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem. After graduating summa cum laude in 1998, McKellar spoke to Congress about better ways to educate America’s youth in mathematics. She also began offering math tutoring and advice on her Web site, danicamckellar.com.
When the New York Times profiled the up-and-coming math prodigy, publishers came calling, asking her to write a book. In 2007, McKellar’s first book, Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail, was immediately popular with kids and parents, paving the way for this fall’s Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss. The books, McKellar says, are good primers “for any hard-core algebra class.”
“Middle school is where math starts to get really hard for kids, and where girls, especially, start to lose interest in the subject. So I knew exactly the book I wanted to write,” says McKellar, who convinced her publisher she could complete the book without help from a ghostwriter by penning a 40-page outline and sample chapters. “It was like I was thrown into the water and already knew how to swim.”
For McKellar, math is more than an intriguing science or a purely academic pursuit. “Above all, when you learn math, you learn a deeper way of appreciating the world and all of its possibilities,” she says. “If I can share that with other people — and it seems like I am — then I have the best life in the world.”
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Photo by John Russo
