Math is like going to the gym for your brain. It sharpens your mind.
Danica McKellar
One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.
I love surprises - champagne and strawberries, all that pampering, romantic stuff. Guys ought to know how to pamper their women properly.
Acting is my first love, and that's my main career, it really is.
My message is: You don't have to give up being popular, fun, or fashionable in order to be smart; they can go hand and hand. Doing math is a great way to exercise your brain; being smart is going to make you more powerful in life.
I learned my French through school. I was lucky in that the tutor on 'The Wonder Years' set spoke fluent French.
When I got to college, I was intending to study film. But I found that my brain was feeling mushy, so I took a few math classes. I started doing really well at them, and solving equations was this, like, drug rush.
Look at Michelle Pfeiffer: My God, she's 50 years old, but she is still so sexy. If I were into women, I would be totally into her.
Math proficiency is the gateway to a number of incredible careers that students may never have considered.
I just love math and most people don't.
You can be obsessed with makeup and hair products and, you know, your appearance and still be absolutely making smart life decisions and work on your smarts, develop your smarts by studying something like math. Then you'll make much better decisions on the brands of clothing that you buy or whatever it is that you want.
If I'm teaching girls that do love to make cookies and do love fashion - that they can use math as a part of that - you think that's me saying, come on girls you belong in the kitchen, you belong shopping? Or, do you think it's me showing them how math is part of all their life, even the part they thought it had nothing to do with?
I love teaching online at my website and soon I'll be writing a math book. I love to teach math. I just don't have time for a full-time teaching gig. Acting is way too time-consuming.
Believe it or not, lots of people change their majors and abandon their dreams just to avoid a couple of math classes in college.
I never had little brothers, so I was totally not used to hearing a lot of cussing at a young age! I learned what 'pull my finger' meant the hard way.
Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard.
I exercise at home - light cardio and yoga.
It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.
When I originally entered UCLA, I had planned to go for a film major, but I kept finding myself taking math classes for fun, 'cause I missed them from high school!
If you're beautiful, you're led to believe that you can't also be smart.
I know we can't always know what medical surprises may happen during childbirth. But my hope is to go fully natural - no epidural, no interventions. Wish me luck.
When you know that you can overcome challenges, you do gain that self-respect, and then you won't end up in a situation that you regret later on.
A lot of girls think they have to choose between being the smart geeky type or the beautiful bimbo.
I've done a little directing, but I love acting more.
I feel blessed to be having a really easy pregnancy.
My main concern with the condition of mathematics in high school is that there's a lot of fear involved! Math is not, generally speaking, presented in a fun way. The concepts, as I see them, are fun, and that's the way I'd like to convey them myself.
Let's make math fun and sexy and glamorous. Smart is sexy, that's one of my main messages.
When girls are asking themselves 'Who am I?' for the first time and they hear all this bad PR about math, they think, 'Well, whoever I am, I'm not somebody who likes math.'
If I had caused any trouble worth mentioning, you would have read about it in 'Star' magazine, which is probably why I didn't cause any trouble worth mentioning.
Most of the time I liked school and got good grades. In junior high, though, I hit a stumbling block with math - I used to come home and cry because of how frustrated I was! But after a few good teachers and a lot of perseverance, I ended up loving math and even choosing it as a major when I got to college.
Math has a lot of negative stereotypes, but it can actually be fun and incredibly empowering.
A reciprocal of a fraction is found by flipping it upside down. If you want the reciprocal of a mixed number or a whole number, just convert it to an improper fraction, and then flip it!
My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, 'Hear me clap, hear the music.' I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear.
There's nothing unclassy about being naked, if it's appropriate.
When I was 15, I had a crush on this guy who was really good at magic, and so I learned to juggle, thinking it would impress him. I spent hours and hours practicing, planning to show him. And then I never even saw him again. But at least I learned how to juggle.
I want girls to feel the confidence you get from being smart. They get so many messages that tell them the most important thing is to be beautiful.
There's no reason to stereotype yourself. Doing math is like going to the gym - it's a workout for your brain and it makes you smarter.
When you do a lot of acting your entire life, you see the entire set from one point of view. To have a chance to step back and pull it all together is really exciting. You want to do it all; you want to have a hand in everything.
I noticed there were so many people, especially women, who would come up to me having recognized me from TV and say, 'I heard you were a math person, why math? Oh my gosh, I could never do math!' I could just see their self-esteem crumbling; I thought that was silly, so I wanted to make math more friendly and accessible.
The fun little proofs that you can do with algebra - they are sort of like crowd pleasers in a way. Like, the .9 repeating equaling one. It doesn't take a lot of algebra to prove that, and it's really fun. It kind of wows people. It's like they're watching magic happen right before their eyes.
I've been eating tons of organic foods, staying away from processed sugars, white flours, and anything artificial. It's the same as my normal regime, but I'm being even stricter, because everything I put into my body is literally building this precious baby inside me.
Girls think that being glamorous means making mistakes and being irresponsible. And that's just not true. The smarter you are, the better prepared you are to make decisions in your life, the more likely you are to lead a satisfying life and be glamorous and fun and anything you want to be.
Students never think it can be the teacher's fault and so I thought I was stupid. I was frustrated and would come home and cry because I couldn't do it. Then we got a new teacher who made math accessible. That made all the difference and I learned that it's how you present it that makes it scary or friendly.
When you do take the home pregnancy test, it doesn't quite seem real. But when you see the baby and the heartbeat on the ultrasound, it's so incredible.
I was born in San Diego, and we moved to Los Angeles when I was seven. A couple of years later, I started acting!
I took a break from acting for four years to get a degree in mathematics at UCLA, and during that time I had the rare opportunity to actually do research as an undergraduate. And myself and two other people co-authored a new theorem: Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models on Two Dimensions, or Z2.
It delights me that I don't fit the stereotype of an actress.
So somebody told me that if I wasn't a coffee drinker yet, by the end of college I'd have to be, because a math major is so tough I would have to stay up very late. I was going to need coffee to do that. Well, merely because they said that, I never drank coffee in college, never got addicted to it, never needed it.
People talk about 'getting rid of the old image', and I guess there's some merit in that. But the truth is that people loved 'The Wonder Years' - I can't turn my back on it.
I played Winnie Cooper on 'The Wonder Years' from ages 12-18, and did a few other movies during some of the summers.
