The 15 Sexiest Nerds and Geeks on TV Shows

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.

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TV Show: 24 (Fox)

Chloe O'Brian has a B.S. degree in computer science, and as an analyst at the Counterterrorism Unit she spends most of her time behind a computer, obtaining critical information from Agent Jack Bauer and hacking into this or that as needed. Chloe evolves into Jack's confidant and accomplice on the show; when Jack goes rogue, Chloe goes with him, in her virtual way. Deep in the soul of every geek is a rebel awaiting the call! (Ideally the call would come in the form of a hologram projected by a droid, but a message from Jack Bauer will do.)

TV Show: The Big Bang Theory (CBS)

Like Penny, the female protagonist and indisputable hottie, Bernadette works at the Cheesecake Factory. Unlike Penny, she is a graduate student in microbiology and has a lot in common, intellectually and culturally, with Penny's super-geeky neighbors. In fact, she marries one of them: Howard Wolowitz, an aerospace engineer who is fluent in Klingon and Elvish. The wedding (in the finale of season five) almost doesn't happen, though, when Bernadette discovers Howard has been having sex with another woman...in World of Warcraft.

TV Show: Dexter (Showtime)

Nerds look up to other nerds, and on Dexter there is no bigger nerd than forensics investigator Vince Masuka. In typical nerd manner, Vince always has women on the brain, but has no skill with the ladies, constantly throwing out groan-inducing innuendo. And then along comes Ryan Chambers, a cute blonde intern with a relentless interest in forensics who seems to worship the ground Vince walks on.

TV Show: Veronica Mars (UPN)

Kid detectives are just inherently geeky. Sure, Veronica Mars may be investigating real crimes, but her every effort is haunted by the legacy of Encyclopedia Brown books and The Bloodhound Gang from 3-2-1 Contact. Plus, for every murder she must solve, she has a "Case of the Stolen Bunsen Burner"-type high school mystery to contend with. And so the badass is, at the same time, a geek. Elementary, dear Kristen.

TV Show: Boy Meets World (ABC)

Topanga is the yin to Cory Matthews' yang. She freaks out over a B, he loses his shit when the Phillies lose. She's rational, he's emotional. She gets into Yale, he (like the rest of the high school gang) gets into the local college, Pennbrook University. She decides to forego Yale for Pennbrook to be with her friends, a strange choice for someone with Ivy League ambitions. Perhaps it has something to do with Cory's yang.

TV Show: Awkward. (MTV)

Jenna is a 15-year-old high school student (played by 20-year-old Rickards) who is all but invisible to her classmates—in fact, she keeps a blog called The Invisible Girl Daily. Then she has an accident in her bathroom involving a bottle of aspirin and a hair dryer dropped into a bathtub; she breaks her arm and injures her neck, and must go to school in one of a cast (with a metal bar going down to her hip) and a neck brace. Suddenly she is not so invisible—in fact, everyone is convinced she tried to commit suicide. You might be a geek if... people think you want to commit suicide because they cannot imagine living your life.

TV Show: The Office (NBC)

Pam Beesly is a frumpy receptionist (at least in the early seasons of the show) living a life of quiet desperation. She has no enthusiasm for her job, which doesn't make her a geek or a nerd, but the nerdiness comes out when she tries to find some smidgen of joy in her workday. So desperate is she to be engaged, and so borderline-OCD is she with pointless projects, that she becomes the go-to girl for all non-productive projects. When you need paper birds folded for the office Olympics, you had better not ask anyone but Pam.

TV Show: Girls (HBO)

Shoshanna is a high-strung Jewish-American princess who fantasizes about being as cool and worldly as her British cousin. Unfortunately, she's a virgin and though she is trying mightily to do the deed and get on with it, her efforts are constantly foiled.

TV Show: Freaks and Geeks (NBC)

Lindsay begins Freaks and Geek's only season firmly in the geek camp: she's a good student all around, but generally best at math, and is in fact a member of the Mathletes. The main plotline of the show is Lindsay's attempt to leave geekdom behind and join the geeks. However, she ends up in a sort of limbo between the two groups. Is she too geeky to be freaky? Could be. Although she adopts a more apathetic worldview and allows herself to start slacking academically, she cannot stop being so geeking nice to everyone.

TV Show: Saved by the Bell (NBC)

You had to suspend your disbelief quite a bit to buy Jessie Spano as a nerd. Whereas some kids are insecure about having a lazy eye or a stutter, Jessie's issue is with her long legs. She's a trained dancer who is on the swim team and becomes a cheerleader her senior year. She's class president. Oh, and she looks like Elizabeth Berkley.

Still, Jessie was somehow not quite right—her transcript is winning (she wanted Stanford, but end up at Columbia) but she is driven by the classic nerd neurosis to be the best at things other people don't care much about. She loses the valedictorian derby to Screech, but he lets her have the honor when he realizes it means so much more to her than it does to him.

TV Show: 30 Rock (NBC)

Tina Fey has always projected the hot nerd image, but for 30 Rock she's nerded it up several notches (which, understandably, many nerds find hot). Liz Lemon is the head writer on TGS who loves Star Wars and has been known to express her astonishment with "By the Hammer of Thor!" Like many nerds, her knowledge of pop culture is extensive but she often has trouble connecting with people on a human level. Boss Jack Donaghy, her polar opposite, describes her as "socially retarded," and isn't wrong.

TV Show: New Girl (Fox)

Jess is an elementary school teacher who has just broken up with her longtime boyfriend. Shellshocked and gun-shy, she moves into an apartment that's a buzzing hive of testosterone. Jess, who leads a troubled-youth bell choir, may be somewhat normal, if a bit naive, by many people's standards, but next to her roommates—a bartender, a lothario and a personal trainer—she's Poindexter squared.

TV Show: Glee (Fox)

The best singer in the New Directions glee club, Rachel is an alpha-geek, which presents its own set of problems. Geeks are all about individualism, though some might call them oddballs or loners. They're so used to doing things nobody else wants to do that working toward a common goal with others is a skill they must learn. Rachel is intense and driven, and needs to learn to back off. After all, some kids join the glee club just because they think singing is fun.

And though Rachel is confident in her pipes and her showmanship, she is fundamentally insecure about her attractiveness. Michele says that "Rachel will never be popular because her looks aren't considered beautiful, and when I was in high school it was the same for me." Less than a year later, Lea was inspiring lust (and catching some heat) with a risque photo shoot, in a locker room wearing thigh-high tube socks, for GQ—so much for not being beautiful.

TV Show: Head of the Class (ABC)

Seeing as Head of the Class was a show about high schoolers in a program for the gifted, it's fair to say they were all nerds—they were anti-Sweat Hogs, yet a bunch of misfits nonetheless. Darlene's particular flavor of nerdiness is spoiled and conservative. She knows she's hot stuff, but is untouchable; rather than use her looks and financial means to enjoy '80s New York in all its depravity, she plays it safe and banks on success in college and forever after.

TV Show: Community (NBC)

The flawed, fallen nerd. Is there any character more pathetic? Annie was a superior student in high school, on her way to college, real college, on scholarship, when she wigged out in the throes of a study-drug addiction and jumped through a plate-glass window yelling, "Everyone's a robot!" Of course, her college dream shattered as well, and in fact she dropped out of high school. Now, at Greendale Community College, she attacks her studies and nerdy extracurriculars with an enthusiasm that her classmates can't quite muster.