Danica McKellar Has A Totally Different Career Now Other Than Acting

Rarely does an actor with success in the entertainment industry decide to step away from the limelight and fame, but that's exactly what Danica McKellar did.

McKellar first broke out onto the scene in 1988 when she starred as Winnie Cooper in "The Wonder Years." For McKellar, acting always seemed to be in her blood. She told Smashing Interviews Magazine, "You know, some of us are born with a desire to role play. I don't know how else to say it. We love acting things out." Because her acting career began early on in her life, McKellar has gone on to do some incredible things. She has become a staple on the Hallmark Channel and was even a celebrity contestant on "Dancing with the Stars."

But before she became a big name on the Hallmark Channel, McKellar had taken a step back from acting and pursued a completely different career. She explained to ET, "I needed to find out how I was valuable outside of Winnie Cooper." She had grown up as a household name thanks to her time on "The Wonder Years," but she wanted more for herself than just an acting career. And if you thought that McKellar would have pursued something in the realm of the acting world, well, you thought wrong because she decided to go for a career in a completely different direction.

In the early '00s, Danica McKellar decided to go back to school and become a mathematician. "The Wonder Years" actor attended UCLA and pursued a degree in mathematics after realizing she had a knack for the subject. She told ET, "Math was challenging and I did well at it. And I love this feeling that my value, the important stuff had nothing to do with how I looked or television." McKellar and several of her classmates even developed a theorem, which is a theory proven to be true through "mathematical operations," per Math World.

In 2006, McKellar explained her theorem to NPR, saying, "These two properties, percolation and Gibbs States multiplicity, they each have a crucial temperate above which they do not happen and below which they do happen. And we proved that for this model, for the Ashkin-Teller Model, those two temperatures are the same." That sounds a bit complicated, and we're sure it is, but McKellar wouldn't have it any other way. She loves challenging herself, and she did just that.

The actor even addressed how fulfilling becoming a mathematician has been, especially coming from the acting world. She told NPR, "I'd rather use my powers in math to be an example that makes people question their stereotypes about what a mathematician looks like." Even though McKellar has since returned to the entertainment industry, she has never truly let go of mathematics.

Danica McKellar may have returned to acting, but she still keeps her love for math alive. A year after graduating from UCLA, "The Wonder Years" actor released her first math book, "Math Doesn't Suck." The description of the book shares, "With Danica as a personal tutor and coach, even the most frustrated student will finally 'get' fractions, decimals, rates, ratios, proportions, 'solving for x,' and more." This was just the beginning for McKellar as she went on to release not one but nine more math books! Some of these books were even meant for children to help them better understand the tough subject.

In 2007, she also created the website McKellar Math, which has links to all her children's books and fun videos on mathematics. The website explains, "The mission of McKellar Math is to explain math concepts in fun, easy-to-digest ways with colorful analogies and simple tricks, and to show kids that math is an inherent part of the world around them." The website assures, "McKellar Math gives kids the tools they need to succeed in math and to build the confidence that comes from feeling smart." McKellar has done good with her mathematics passion, and it has proven to be a success, with her becoming a New York Times bestseller and accumulating over 10 thousand followers on Instagram. And the actor isn't slowing down any time soon, so be prepared for more books in the future.