Welsh beauty Carol Vorderman is a successful TV presenter, author, and mathematician, albeit she graduated from Cambridge with a third class degree (thus giving way to the saying that third-class degrees are "Vordermans". Born in Prestatyn on Christmas Eve, 1960, Vorderman was raised in a single-parent household as she never met her real father till January of this year.
Opportunity came knocking for Vorderman after graduation from Cambridge when her mother in 1982 noticed an ad in a newspaper for a woman with good mathematical skills to co-host a TV show. The show was Countdown and is still one of the longest-running quiz shows on UK television today. She reportedly earns ? 3 million a year and she also presents programs for ITV.
A successful columnist, she writes for the leading UK newspapers and has published books on the subject of dieting. She has also published books on how to solve Sudoku problems. Her autobiography, tentatively titled Nobbut A Clever Nobber, is due to be published in 2008.
Her personal life has not been without its ups and downs. She is twice divorced and recently separated form her recent partner. She is the mother of two children, Katie and Cameron, born during her second marriage to Patrick King. She has also been on the UK's worst dressed list, and the reason being that her detractors have called her "an overdone 80s nightmare". There was also a petition signed by over 88,000 people asking for her to be removed from home loan television advertisements.
All these setbacks cannot possibly affect someone who reportedly has an IQ of 154 and was a member of Mensa. With her successful books and an MBE awarded to her in 2000, it looks like Vorderman will still be around for many years to come.