I was born in San Diego, and we moved to Los Angeles when I was seven. A couple of years later, I started acting!
I played Winnie Cooper on ‘The Wonder Years’ from ages 12-18, and did a few other movies during some of the summers.
I feel blessed to be having a really easy pregnancy.
Keep an eye on what your kids are seeing online. Parents need to stay involved in what their children are being exposed to. It’s so important.
I want girls to feel the confidence you get from being smart. They get so many messages that tell them the most important thing is to be beautiful.
Believe it or not, lots of people change their majors and abandon their dreams just to avoid a couple of math classes in college.
When I was 15, I had a crush on this guy who was really good at magic, and so I learned to juggle, thinking it would impress him. I spent hours and hours practicing, planning to show him. And then I never even saw him again. But at least I learned how to juggle.
I’m the kind of person that responds strongly to a challenge.
In high school, a teacher once suggested that I be a math major in college. I thought, ‘Me? You’ve got to be joking!’ I mean, in junior high, I used to come home and cry because I was so afraid of my math homework. Seriously, I was terrified of math.
I just love math and most people don’t.
Girls think that being glamorous means making mistakes and being irresponsible. And that’s just not true. The smarter you are, the better prepared you are to make decisions in your life, the more likely you are to lead a satisfying life and be glamorous and fun and anything you want to be.
I learned my French through school. I was lucky in that the tutor on ‘The Wonder Years’ set spoke fluent French.
Acting is my first love, and that’s my main career, it really is.
When girls are asking themselves ‘Who am I?’ for the first time and they hear all this bad PR about math, they think, ‘Well, whoever I am, I’m not somebody who likes math.’
My message is: You don’t have to give up being popular, fun, or fashionable in order to be smart; they can go hand and hand. Doing math is a great way to exercise your brain; being smart is going to make you more powerful in life.
If a guy is skilled at anything, that’s attractive. There’s something very primal about that and, sure, it can be as simple as figuring out the tip quickly. It’s really cool when a guy tips 20 percent quickly and effortlessly so that when the check comes, he opens it and signs his name and done.
I exercise at home – light cardio and yoga.
When I originally entered UCLA, I had planned to go for a film major, but I kept finding myself taking math classes for fun, ’cause I missed them from high school!
The fun little proofs that you can do with algebra – they are sort of like crowd pleasers in a way. Like, the .9 repeating equaling one. It doesn’t take a lot of algebra to prove that, and it’s really fun. It kind of wows people. It’s like they’re watching magic happen right before their eyes.
When you do a lot of acting your entire life, you see the entire set from one point of view. To have a chance to step back and pull it all together is really exciting. You want to do it all; you want to have a hand in everything.