IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2008 - 17

A Guardian Angel

Proving a Theorem

The story of McKellar's success in math
begins, in a sense, in junior high school.
She had Mrs. Jacobson in the seventh
grade, and "she really knew her stuff,"
says McKellar. But the girl who had
always been a good student found herself
struggling with the subject, and math
anxiety began to set in. During one quiz,
the anxiety was so bad that even though
McKellar had studied hard, when the
time came to turn it in, she had written
not one answer down. Jacobson gave her
extra time to work on the quiz during
recess, and from that moment on, the
way she approached math was never
quite the same. "I had hit my low. I got
really scared, really overwhelmed. I
thought I could never do it. I could never
relax and remember what I knew,"
McKellar recalls. "The extra time was like
a gift from heaven....It's amazing what a
teacher can do. She was like a guardian
angel." McKellar learned to calm herself
down (sometimes by thinking of fluffy
clouds or rainbows), and "once I got it
and understood it, I loved it," she says.
She was already taking math classes
at UCLA when she met Lincoln Chayes,
a mathematical physicist. McKellar took
his classes, and Chayes approached her
and another talented student, Brandy
Winn, with a rare opportunity: the
chance to work on an original research
project, as a rule not offered to undergraduates. For nine months, he taught
them privately, providing them with the
background information they would
need to tackle the work. For the next
four months, the two students worked
together 12 hours a day, from 11 a.m. to
11 p.m., sometimes at McKellar's house,
sometimes at Winn's, trying to prove an
original mathematical theorem (see
"The Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem
Explained"). The project became the
center of their universe. They took
some weekends off, McKellar says,
"when life interfered, but it rarely did.
We were pretty single-minded at the
time."

They didn't know for sure the theorem
was provable, and at the same time, they
thought they had proved it a number of
times, only to realize they had overlooked something or gone down the
wrong path. When they finally had it-in
essence, when they couldn't find any
more loopholes or problems or mistakes,
and Chayes had confirmed it-they sent
it off to the British Journal of Physics,
where it was published. McKellar knows
"the professor could have solved it
faster by himself, but he wanted
to give us that experience of
what it's like to be a professional mathematician. It
makes me have a lot of
respect for people who do it
all the time."
McKellar briefly considered a career as a professional
mathematician but couldn't see
a way of combining it with her
first love, acting. She returned to television after graduation, appearing in a
recurring role as speechwriter Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing in 2002 and 2003,
and making guest appearances on shows
including Navy NCIS and NYPD Blue.
Then, in July 2005, seemingly out of the
blue, her math achievements-including
the math problems from fans she
answered on her Web site, danicamckellar.com-were featured in the Science
section of The New York Times ["Between
Series, an Actress Became a Superstar (in
Math)" by Kenneth Chang, July 19, 2005].
Not long after, literary agents started calling, wanting to know if she would consider writing a book about math.
She knew immediately the kind of
book she would write and who the target
audience would be. In 2000, she had testified before the House Science Subcommittee on Technology about how to
attract more women into science, engineering, and technology (SET). A commission had been developed to address
the issue, and McKellar had read its
report, done her own research and reflect-

WINTER 2008/2009

ed on her own experience. She remembered how nervous she was to take her
first calculus class at UCLA and how inaccessible she once believed math to be,
even though "I had gotten a score of 5 on

the AP exam-the highest score in the
hardest class," she says. "I didn't think I
could do it. But if I couldn't do it, who
could? In my mind, other people do math.
Who are those other people? Nerdy guys."

Why Don't Girls Continue in Math?
The problem, as she saw it, was that most
girls aren't encouraged to develop an
interest in math, and they don't have a
real sense of the career options or opportunities available in SET. And it was a
problem that began early. "Why don't girls
continue in math, even those who do
well? It all pointed to the same answer:
Middle school is the time," she says. "As
soon as they're asking themselves who
they are-and at 13, 14, that's when
they're asking themselves that question-
they think, 'I don't know, but I know I'm
not a math person.'"
So McKellar wrote Math Doesn't
Suck: How to Survive Middle School
Math Without Losing Your Mind or

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