This week's brainiac bombshell: Danica McKellar. You may remember her as Kevin Arnold's long-standing crush, Winnie Cooper, on the classic television show The Wonder Years. More recently, you might have caught her in her role as Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing or Trudy on How I Met Your Mother. Or perhaps you've perused a physics journal and stumbled across the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem she co-authored before graduating summa cum laude in mathematics from UCLA. Danica took

A good way to stir up some controversy is to bring up possible differences between the way men and women write code. Add to it a tone that suggests that women write better code, and you'll really get people talking. Is there something to it? Would you really be able to tell the difference between male and female code, and could you really say that one is better than the other? Programming computer applications involves writing multiple lines of instructions that will be turne

If there was ever a doubt that computer science and engineering are exciting career choices, let the recently released hit animated picture Wall-E change your mind. What most people see when they watch this movie is a touching love story from an unexpected source. Sure, I saw this too, but I also saw some of the many reasons it would be really cool to work in the computer animation industry! Back in the old days, many of the people who worked on computer animations were in fa

Starlets. They're everywhere. On television, in magazines, splashed across the Internet, and constantly in our faces, the Hollywood It Girl is as ubiquitous as oxygen. We can't seem to escape her, and some of us admittedly don’t want to. But to those of us who pride ourselves on our intelligence, aren’t some of these so-called role models rather… uninspiring? Here at Nerd Girls, we like to give props to girls who say what they mean and mean what they say. And when they're sma

We are desperately trying to identify and solve the issues that prevent girls from pursuing engineering and science careers. So let’s ask, “What are girls interested in?” To answer this, try taking a look at what they are watching on television. Have you ever seen a television show where the main characters are engineers? We see Lawyers, Doctors, Educators and Law Enforcement. Why not engineers? Well, Hollywood might say, “No one is interested in the life of a nerd”. Now, the