 In 2010, bestselling author Dan Brown named a character, Nola Kaye, in his novel "The Lost Symbol" after her, in an anagram pattern.Dunin was born in Santa Monica, California, the older of two children to Stanley Dunin, a Polish-American mathematician, and Elsie Ivancich, a Croatian-American dance ethnologist at UCLA.Dunin graduated in 1976 from University High School, and then enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA, but dropped out near the end of her freshman year.