Top 44 Danica McKellar Quotes

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.’

This much I’m sure of. Chances for winning = 1 – (# of math students playing)/ (# of math students cheering). That’s a fraction.

By the end of an intense four years at UCLA, I had co-authored a new math proof, which the media, in fact, loved. As it turned out, math itself blazed my entry back into the spotlight and consequently into wonderful acting jobs like ‘The West Wing’ and others. You just never know, do you?

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.

Look at Jessica Simpson. She’s famous for being dumb. I guess it started with Marylyn Monroe, and she actually wasn’t that dumb, but that’s how she was perceived – and that’s what got popular.

If a guy is skilled at anything, that’s attractive. There’s something very primal about that and, sure, it can be as simple as figuring out the tip quickly. It’s really cool when a guy tips 20 percent quickly and effortlessly so that when the check comes, he opens it and signs his name and done.

I just love math and most people don’t.

Acting is my first love, and that’s my main career, it really is.

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.

At the risk of being forgotten completely by the media, I went to college and pursued a passion that had nothing to do with acting: mathematics.

Confidence is one of the sexiest things in guys and girls.

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.

If anyone tells you it’s impossible to be fabulous and smart and make a ton of money using math, well, they can just get in line behind you – and kiss your math.

Math has a lot of negative stereotypes, but it can actually be fun and incredibly empowering.

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.

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.

Let’s face it; by and large math is not easy, but that’s what makes it so rewarding when you conquer a problem, and reach new heights of understanding.

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 love acting. Acting is a true love of mine, acting and math. Although they are both creative, they use very different sides of your brain. And I love both. Acting is my first love, and that’s my main career, it really is.

I want to help middle-school girls stay interested in math and be good at it, and see it as friendly and accessible and not this scary thing. Everyone else in society tells them it’s not for them. It’s for nerdy white guys with pocket protectors.

There is an epidemic right now of girls dumbing themselves down… in middle school because they think it makes them attractive.

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.

When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We’d play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He’d read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.

I recognize that I have a unique position to be a role model to young girls because I am doing something that they consider glamorous, which is acting, and yet I took a time to really get my education and study mathematics, and I think math is the cat’s meow.

Teenage girls these days are more and more getting lured into thinking they should dumb themselves down, and that’s going to attract the wrong kind of guy, and it’s serious. It’s serious business.

I used to love to go to the movies – I’d see two in a row. A few times I even snuck into the second movie after it started… now that I think about it, that’s kind of like shoplifting! Needless to say, I still love going to the movies, but I don’t sneak in anymore.

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.

There’s nothing unclassy about being naked, if it’s appropriate.

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.

In high school, a teacher once suggested that I be a math major in college. I thought, ‘Me? You’ve got to be joking!’ I mean, in junior high, I used to come home and cry because I was so afraid of my math homework. Seriously, I was terrified of math.

I played Winnie Cooper on ‘The Wonder Years’ from ages 12-18, and did a few other movies during some of the summers.

I’ve done a lot of surveys and interacted with a lot of students, and I was shocked to see that at 12 years old, girls are already talking about dumbing themselves down.

I’ve done a little directing, but I love acting more.

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 just did a spread in ‘Maxim’, I’m 35 years old. I’ve had women and parents email me asking if I should really be doing that, since I’m still considered a role model.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of girls think they have to choose between being the smart geeky type or the beautiful bimbo.

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.

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 tell students that even if they don’t like math right now, they can use math as a brain-sharpening tool – a tool that not only builds the foundation for a great career, but that also builds self-confidence, no matter what they choose to do with their lives.

It delights me that I don’t fit the stereotype of an actress.

I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it’s too late by college.