Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and a Whole Lot of Nerd Love

Do you update your Facebook page to say that you’re at Comicon? Do you worry about how to increase your RAM? Is your ideal way to spend a Friday night doing homework with your study group? Do you think Big Bang night is clean, wholesome fun? Then you are a nerd, and the chances are that you want to date one too (unless you can go out with Penny—see above).

Well, you’ve come to the right place. According to Match.com, Silicon Valley is nerdvana, with two of the top 10 cities in the U.S. for finding nerd love.

Match.com crossed the cities with the highest level of education in either technical or educational fields (no, field work in Anthropology doesn’t count) to come up with the top ten cities to find nerd love. For the most part the results are obvious, though there are a couple of zingers there too. Boulder, Colorado, for instance, coming in at number seven, is better known for skiing in the Rockies than skiing on the Wii. And with all due respect to Ann Arbor (number 6), it is still in Michigan.

So who are the big winners?

Number one is obviously Sunnyvale, home to Vito’s Famous Pizza, but more importantly, home to Yahoo (have the non-nerds of Match.com even heard of Mountain and that pesky little company that begins with a G?). It’s also the home of Palm and a number of aerospace and defense companies. But Match.com kind of loses it, when it notes that Sunnyvale is also “one of the few U.S. cities to have a single unified Department of Public Safety (where all personnel are trained as firefighters, police officers and EMTs).” Firefighter? Police officer? EMT? Those are hardly nerd occupations.

Sunnyvale is followed by Cambridge and Somerville, both in Massachusetts. It is as if the website hasn’t realized that nerd extraordinaire Mark Zuckerberg (who founded Facebook as a way to get dates) has long since left for sunny California.

Berkeley comes in at number four, followed by our own Santa Clara. It’s touted as the headquarters of “Intel, Sun Microsystems, and many other high-tech companies, but also as the home of Santa Clara University and Mission College.

The last three towns on the list—Columbia, Maryland, Fairfax, Virginia, and Rockville, Maryland—are all suburbs of DC. Apparently, Match.com cannot distinguish between nerds and wonks.