Danica McKellar Quotes

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 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.

I exercise at home - light cardio and yoga.

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

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 learned my French through school. I was lucky in that the tutor on 'The Wonder Years' set spoke fluent French.

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.

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'll admit that I do quite like drinks that come in coconut shells. So there's always that.

Math is like going to the gym for your brain. It sharpens your mind.

Math proficiency is the gateway to a number of incredible careers that students may never have considered.

I wasn't in school often enough to really belong to a 'clique,' but my friends all studied hard and got pretty good grades. They were good people with self-respect. I still like to be friends with people I admire something about; I really believe that we become like the people we're surrounded by, so I choose my friends carefully!

Let's make math fun and sexy and glamorous. Smart is sexy, that's one of my main messages.

I love surprises - champagne and strawberries, all that pampering, romantic stuff. Guys ought to know how to pamper their women properly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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!

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

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.

The end of a marriage has got to be one of the saddest events one can experience. I’ve heard that the pain [of divorce] is second only to an actual death in the family, and that sounds about right.

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.

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

If you're beautiful, you're led to believe that you can't also be smart. But you can be fun and fit and social and be really smart. And the smarter you are, the more capable you'll be to handle whatever challenges come up in life.

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.

There are stereotypes that have been out there for a long time that tell girls that their main asset, the main thing that they are valued for, is their appearance and also that it's to the exclusion of anything else.

The camera fails to capture the 'business' in show business! We typically will give 10 percent of our salary to the agent, 10 percent to the manager, and 5 percent to the lawyer, plus the publicist gets a flat fee, which needs to be budgeted for.

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.

I went to about one frat party a year. A year seemed to be enough time for me to forget how much I didn't like frat parties, and my friends would eventually convince me to go to one. Cheap beer, guys looking for a quick hook-up, and girls playing 'dumb' to get in on the hook-up. I just never got into it.

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.

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 want girls to feel the confidence you get from being smart.

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.

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.

I've always been really cautious about guys who have a Winnie Cooper fantasy, and I'm so glad about that. I mean, I can count on one hand the guys I've been with. It was really challenging, but I never gave it up too soon, if you know what I mean.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.