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Math Doesn't Suck

Speaking of Numbers...

A few years ago I was on a flight from Boston to LA when I saw Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years) sitting in business class. I later looked up IMDb to see what she'd been up to and discovered she'd graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with a BS in mathematics.

Furthermore while there, she published a paper that got her a finite Erdős number, making her one of the few people that has both a finite Erdős number (hers is 4) and finite Bacon number (just 2 in her case). (See Wikipedia's Erdos-Bacon number article for a list of other people with both.)

For a while, Danica's had a feature on her website where she answers maths questions posed by fans.

Then, earlier this month, she published a book entitled Math Doesn't Suck : How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. I'm clearly not the target audience but if I had a daughter, she could do a lot worse than have Danica McKellar as a role-model.

Way to go Danica!

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Comments (1)

rcriii on Aug. 13, 2007:

The other day my daughter was in the office. In conversation with my boss' boss, I mentioned that she had spent the morning working on a math workbook. He said to her "You don't like maths, do you?" In a small voice, she said that she really did.