Chicago Tribune: "The selection of Danica McKellar for the lead in the just-opened West Coast production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play 'Proof' must be the most perfect type-casting in the history of the American theater. Authored by University of Chicago alum David Auburn, "Proof" is about a neurotic and brilliant young woman named Catherine, who claims to have written an extraordinarily complicated and important mathematical "proof" that was found among the belongings of her late and loony U. of C. mathematical genius father. Not only does everyone doubt her claim; her elder sister sees it as evidence that Catherine belongs on a funny farm herself. McKellar herself actually is a genuine math whiz and she actually did once author such a mathematical proof, graduating summa cum laude from UCLA in 1998 with a degree in analytical math. The proof she had to complete was all about "Percolation and Gibb's-states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models in two dimensions." "We worked tirelessly," she said. "You experiment with things. You try different techniques. You try to get at the problem from different angles. The scary part about working on an original proof is that you don't know if the thing is provable. The theorem eventually did turn out to be true, thank goodness," she said. "The experience of proving it was amazing. It was so intense. There was no room for any other thought, any other subject during that time." The charming McKellar is perhaps best known as teen throb Winnie Cooper on "The Wonder Years" -- and, now, as the dryly witty White House speechwriter Elsie Snuffin on "The West Wing." (Thanks, Tim!)
