One hazard of being an attractive starlet is that many people assume you’re not that smart. This, however, is no problem for Danica McKellar, a 30-year-old former star of The Wonder Years and regular on The West Wing, because she’s actually got documented proof of her brilliance: She’s the author of the mathematical proof “Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on Z-squared” (PDF), which she cowrote while doing a degree at the University of California.

There’s an excellent profile of her in the Science section of yesterday’s New York Times, which tells the life-imitates-art story of when McKellar auditioned for the lead role in a San Diego production of the play Proof, in which a young woman claims to have solved a complex mathematical proof:

At an audition, the casting director asked about what she knew of math. Ms. McKellar said she was co-author of a mathematics proof.

“She went into a five-minute explanation,” said Sam Woodhouse, the artistic director of the San Diego Repertory Theater. “Which was a stunning and mystifying five minutes.”

McKellar even managed to talk about math during a Q&A in the current issue of Stuff magazine, in which she also appears in the cover wearing black lingerie:

Q: After [The Wonder Years], you attended UCLA, became a genius and published a paper on Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on Z2. I really enjoyed the part on infinite occupied clusters.

A: It’s really complicated and not that interesting to most people.

Heh. Perhaps the coolest and weirdest thing about McKellar is that she actually gets fan mail about math. High-school kids email her complicated math questions; she walks them through the answers on her web site. Check it out and bone up on your probability theory, puzzles about rates, and the physics of tossing a baseball from the outfield to the catcher.