A former Hallmark star recently opened up about an impressive accomplishment she achieved away from the entertainment industry. “MatchMaker Mysteries” star Danica McKellar stepped away from Hollywood after her time playing Winnie Cooper on “The Wonder Years,” and she attended college. While studying math at UCLA, McKellar co-authored a mathematical physics theorem, something quite unique that her colleagues likely could never achieve.
Danica McKellar’s Mathematical Theorem Is ‘Famous’
In September, McKellar joined an episode of the podcast “Hey Dude… The 90s Called!” When asked about the mathematical physics theorem she co-authored, she sheepishly said, “I mean, it’s only famous because I was an author on it and it’s like, oh, wow. Winnie Cooper helped to write a math theorem.”
McKellar may have tried to downplay the significance of it all, but she acknowledged, “It’s been cited in a few other journals and it was used for something. It was tangentially related to helping some sort of computer software go a little faster or something.”
She admitted, “I’m not, I don’t even understand its applications. I understood what I was doing at the time.”
The Experience Was ‘Very Satisfying’ for the Former Hallmark Star
The opportunity came about as McKellar was earning a stipend while spending a summer doing research. She shared, “It was exciting to be like a professional mathematician for the summer and prove something that hadn’t been proved.”
McKellar noted it was “not like one of those Eureka moments because you know what you’re trying to prove.” However, it was still a thrill to work through the slow process and verify the end result. “There’s no ‘aha,’ the light bulb goes off right? It was still very satisfying,” McKellar stated.
During the podcast, she described the process of accomplishing what she did. McKellar explained, “So you try to create an argument for it and you’re like, ‘Okay, I don’t see any mistakes. Oh wait, there’s a loophole that doesn’t really account for all the cases.’ And then you do it again.”
In 2006, McKellar talked to NPR about the accomplishment. She shared that the official, complicated name of the theorem is “Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashikin-Teller Models on Two Dimensions, or Z2.”
McKellar explained that was the name of the published paper. However, when media outlets started reporting on it, they simplified the name and started referring to it as the Chayes-McKellar-Win Theorem. Now, she noted, “It’s sort of become known as that.”
Danica McKellar is no longer at HALLMARK. She is with the Great American Movies