Natalie Portman, Scientific Genius in REAL Life!

The New York Times published a great article about the serious scientific credentials of some of hollywood's most celebrated stars, Natalie Portman among them.

As a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel Science Talent Search competition. Her project was a new “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy. She also went to Harvard University and studied neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

Ms. Portman apparently is not the only actor with serious scientific credentials.

Hedy Lamarr, the actress considered the "most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping,” which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track.

Danica McKellar, who has appeared on such shows as “The Wonder Years,” “The West Wing,” “NYPD Blue” and “Young Justice,” graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she helped devise a mathematical proof for certain properties of magnetic fields — a theorem that bears her name along with those of her collaborators.

Mayim Bialik plays the adorably frumpy-nerdy neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler on the "Big Bang Theory" sitcom. In real life, she also has a Ph.D. from U.C.L.A. in neurobiology.

Read this great story in the NYT here.