With the fourth season of Glee premiering this Thursday, we got to thinking: we've had plenty of geeky characters, but they've always been oddballs in the context of normaldom. And let's face it, they've usually been male. Sitcom nerds like Radar O'Reilly (M*A*S*H), Alex P. Keaton (Family Ties), Dwayne Wayne (A Different World) and others played their nerdiness for laughs, while the United Loan Gunmen (The X-Files), MacGuyver (MacGuyver), and the Eppes brothers (Numb3rs) sent a message that if you do your trigonometry homework someday you, too, will fight crime and/or government conspiracy.
But hot girl geeks? Sexy lady nerds? They're harder to track down, but they're out there. Girl solving high school mysteries? Nerd. Head writer on a comedy program who habitually drops Star Wars references? Geek. If you grow up to have a career in forensics or computer whizzery, you've got strong nerd DNA. And if you approach glee club (yes, a la Glee's Rachel Berry) with the determination of an Olympian in training, you're a geek.
Here's our tribute to the 15 hottest TV geek/nerd babes, those who'd fit right in with the little sisters at the Lambda Lambda Lambda house.