WOW! Winnie from The Wonder Years is all grown up!

We grew up watching her as Kevin Arnold’s crush and on-off girlfriend Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years. While many child stars go off the rails later in life, Danica McKellar has gone on to do some pretty amazing things.

After leaving the show, Danica went to UCLA where she graduated summa cum laude (highest honours) with a degree in Mathematics. In fact, Danica is such a talented and internationally-recognised mathematician that she’s been honoured in Britain’s Journal of Physics and The New York Times for her work, which includes co-authoring a groundbreaking mathematical physics theorem which was named after her – the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem.

Not content with that, Danica now does all she can to advocate maths education and dispel the stereotype of the ‘math nerd’ for young people – especially young girls – with New York Times best-selling maths books such as Math Doesn’t Suck and Kiss My Math, as well as You Tube videos like this.

Oh yeah, and she still dabbles in acting on the side, just for fun.

‘It’s hard to describe why I love acting,’ she says. ‘I’ve always had two sides to my personality – on the one hand I love logic and math and puzzles, and on the other, I just love to entertain people. I have an instinct to tell human stories with the belief that somehow we understand ourselves better when we see someone projected up on a screen, someone who is saying things we’ve said and feeling what we’ve felt. I also do it because it feeds an instinct that I have to share something.’