Posted on 07/22/2005 12:02:04 PM PDT by GreenLanternCorps
On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series "The Wonder Years," takes on questions that require more than a moment's thought to answer.
"If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself," one fan asked recently, "and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?"
"This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."
Ms. McKellar, now a semiregular on "The West Wing" playing a White House speechwriter, Elsie Snuffin, is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.
Her mathematics knowledge extends well beyond calculus. As a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, she also took more esoteric classes, the ones with names like "complex analysis" and "real analysis," and she pondered making a career move to professional mathematician.
"I love that stuff," Ms. McKellar said last month during a visit to Manhattan after a play-reading in the Hamptons. Her conversation was peppered with terminology like "epsilons" and "limsups" (pronounced "lim soups").
"I love continuous functions and proving if functions are continuous or not," she said.
She may also be the only actress, now or ever, to prove a new mathematical theorem, one that bears her name. Certainly, she is the only theorem prover who appears wearing black lingerie in the July issue of Stuff magazine. Even in that interview, she mentioned math.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Students don't much get into proofs until grad school. But once there, there are vast fields in math that have hardly been touched, which means boatloads of theorems in need of proof.
Ok, first I am not an math major but when I thought about the problem I thought about my own sons' washing my car. The older one can wash it in 6 minutes and the younger in 8 minutes. They both start washing the car at the same time. Older son finishes his side in 3 minutes and younger in 4 minutes--are you suggesting that the boy who finishes his side first would begin to help wash his brother's side so they would finish in 3 and a half minutes instead of four? The car is not clean until both sides are done. Four minutes.
TS
(a high school math teacher)
A subject near & dear, eh?
Nice!
It's still more than I could do on my best day! LOL
I never got past Intermediate Alegebra, in which I scraped a D-. This from someone with a math professor for an uncle! Obviously, I didn't inherit any math genes. :)
Winnie Cooper was the only think that made the intro song bearable.
I just think it's interesting, considering his mondo-goofy persona on-screen. His fraternal twin, Michael, has cardiomyopathy. Ashton wanted to study medicine to try and find a treatment for him.
That's a good brother. My little bro became an attorney so he could kick my ass legally.
Unless Brian is Sam's older brother, in which case it'll be Sam's face that will get sprayed. And possibly her butt for good measure.
TS
LOL! So true.
http://www.stuffmagazine.com/girls/danica_m
beauty and brains.... wonderful
Of course, he did drop out to become a male model. So take it for what it's worth. ;o)
opps, bad link, sorry
try this
http://www.stuffmagazine.com/cover_girls/girl.aspx?id=468
Not to mention osculating her planes.
I waqtched that show for years when I was a kid just because of her.
Still not enough to make me watch West Wing, but it is close.
Yowza!
Exactly. These sorts of problems have a built-in assumption that the work can be divided with perfect efficiency (which is generally false in the real world, as others have noted). So the boy who does his half in 3 minutes starts working on what's left over on the other half at the same rate, and the slower boy ends up doing less than half.
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