Winnie

You remember her from the Wonder Years. Who knew that Danica McKellar was an arithmo-babe, too? (You can also see her personal web site here. She even does a little online tutoring!)

Here's a little taste of that NY Times article:

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...

For a simple model of magnetism, Professor Chayes [teacher of her Real Analysis class] thought that [McKellar and a fellow student] might be able to prove a property that would indicate when the magnetic field would line up in a certain direction...

...the students spent months more, up to 12 hours a day, working on the proof...

Sometimes, they spent days on an approach before finding an obvious flaw. Other times, they thought they had finished, before Professor Chayes would find an error or oversight. And, finally, Professor Chayes found no more gaps.

A paper with an imposing title - "Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models on Z²" - appeared in a British mathematical physics journal, and Ms. McKellar presented the findings at a statistical mechanics conference at Rutgers, the only undergraduate to speak.

Today, the proof is known as the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem.

Be still my heart.