If you're beautiful, you're led to believe that you can't also be smart. But you can be fun and fit and social and be really smart. And the smarter you are, the more capable you'll be to handle whatever challenges come up in life.
Let's make math fun and sexy and glamorous. Smart is sexy, that's one of my main messages.
My main concern with the condition of mathematics in high school is that there's a lot of fear involved! Math is not, generally speaking, presented in a fun way. The concepts, as I see them, are fun, and that's the way I'd like to convey them myself.
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.
Math has a lot of negative stereotypes, but it can actually be fun and incredibly empowering.
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.
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 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!
