Overview (4)

Born November 27, 1955 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA Birth Name William Sanford Nye Nicknames Bill Nye the Science Guy

The Science Guy Height 6' 0½" (1.84 m)

Mini Bio (1)

Bill Nye was born on November 27, 1955 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA as William Sanford Nye. He is an actor and writer, known for Bill Nye, the Science Guy (1993), Flubber (1997) and Stargate: Atlantis (2004). He was previously married to Blair Tindall.



Spouse (1)

Trade Mark (1)

Always appears with bow-tie and lab coat



Trivia (19)

Schools Attended: Lafayette Elementary School and Sidwell Friends School both in Washington, DC. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.



Worked as an engineer at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle, and appeared in at least 3 training films, some of which are still popular among the workers there.





Started his career after he won a Steve Martin lookalike contest.

His father, Edwin D. "Ned" Nye, a quartermaster in the military during World War II, spent nearly four years as a prisoner of war mostly in China in a Japanese P.O.W camp. He later moved to Washington, DC, where he discovered dozens of sundials. He photographed them and wrote an unusual book, "Sundials of Maryland and Virginia." Thus resulted a little family business selling Ned Nye's "Sandial®," a sundial suitable for the beaches of the Atlantic seaboard.



Self-proclaimed geek in high school. He wore a tie every day, even when that aspect of the dress code was phased out. He graduated from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC.



He designed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor which is used in Boeing 747s.



His first childhood memory is throwing a rubber band-powered airplane, the Sky Streak, and figuring out how to make it turn left so he could stay in one place and make the plane come back to him.





An honored as Rhodes Class of '56 Visiting Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he received his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. He studied under Carl Sagan



Premiered his Science Guy character on the Seattle sketch comedy show Almost Live! (1984).

Enjoys '30s/'40s-style swing dancing and attended dances at the most recent Camp Hollywood.





Announced he was engaged to be married to Blair Tindall on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005) in December 2005. The "marriage" lasted less than a month before it was either annulled or deemed invalid (sources disagree on the detail). In November 2007, Nye filed for a restraining order against "ex-fiance" Tindall, saying that he wondered if she might have poured solvent on his garden. The restraining order was later dismissed.



Good friends with Kevin Brauch

Quit working at Boeing in the early '80s to become a stand-up comedian.



One of his characters on the Seattle-based sketch show, "Almost Live", was a humorless caped superhero, Speed Walker.



One of his "Almost Live" co-stars in Seattle was Bob Nelson, screenwriter of "Nebraska".



His maternal grandmother, Lucy Marie Berta Briot, was French. His other ancestry includes English, Welsh, and Irish.



Bill is agnostic.



Serves on the Advisory Board of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science.



Personal Quotes (5)

[advice to young scientists] Try things then clean up after yourself. Then try some more things and clean that up too.



Our country is the only country in the world that has some people that don't believe in evolution. America is still the leader in scientific advancement, and yet we have adults who want to ignore the evidence of millions and millions of years to believe something much more complicated and complex with zero proof. It's important that our children are raised to be educated, well-rounded tax paying citizens that understand the importance of technology and science. If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions. I think in 30-40 years this won't even be an issue, but right now it's a major concern for a country that has a significant amount of adults raising children to ignore the facts and the evidence surrounding them about our universe, our creation and our well-being.



Science rules!



[on how he makes the average person understand science] You have to have learning objectives - things you want to get across. You want to make a point: Humans and dinosaurs did not live concurrently. If you get the adjacent carbon dating of volcanic soil, hat's cool. But what I want you to get is that ancient dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time. The rest is gravy.



[on climate change, 2019] I didn't mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were twelve. But you're adults now, and this is an actual crisis.

