- Quit working at Boeing in the early '80s to become a stand-up comedian.
- 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.
- 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.
- Started his career after he won a Steve Martin lookalike contest.
- He is the son of Jacqueline Blanche (Jenkins) and Edwin Darby "Ned" Nye, a quartermaster in the military during World War II. His father spent nearly four years as a prisoner of war mostly in China in a Japanese P.O.W camp. He later moved to Washington, D.C., 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.
- Lives in Los Angeles. Neighbors include Ed Begley Jr. and Alex Trebek.
- He designed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor which is used in Boeing 747s.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Bill's maternal grandmother, Lucie Marie Berta Briot, was French, and was born in Rennepont, Haute-Marne, France. She married Bill's grandfather, Sanford Swindell Jenkins, from Town Creek, Brunswick, North Carolina, in 1919, after WWI. His other ancestry includes English, Welsh, and Irish. Bill has deep roots in his birthplace of Washington, D.C., going back to at least his paternal great-great-grandmother Mary E., born there in 1835. On his father's side, he also has considerable Colonial American ancestry in New England, particularly Massachusetts, where the Nye family settled in the 1600s.
- Bill is agnostic.
- One of his characters on the Seattle-based sketch show, "Almost Live", was a humorless caped superhero, Speed Walker.
- 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.
- One of his "Almost Live" co-stars in Seattle was Bob Nelson, screenwriter of "Nebraska".
- His mother Jacqueline Jenkins-Nye served as a cryptologist for the United States Navy during World War II.
- Serves on the Advisory Board of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science.
- Schools Attended: Lafayette Elementary School and Sidwell Friends School both in Washington, DC. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
- Sometimes gets confused with Bill Nighy even though they met in New York City.
- Good friends with Kevin Brauch.
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