It isn’t for all, but I would add St. John’s College. I think that any college that emphasizes the Socratic Method will attract a “nerdy” population. There is nowhere to hide.
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You might add Willamette to your list — it didn’t strike me as nerdy as Whitman, but definitely had its quirky students and felt nerdier than Lewis and Clark and Puget Sound to me.
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Just based on the kids I know who have that friendly nerdy vibe you describe: Whitman, WUSTL, Rice, Carleton, Oberlin, Pomona, Brown. The STEM kids love Colorado School of Mines, Georgia Tech, and Harvey Mudd.
I disagree that Penn is nerdy. Intellectual, yes. But it’s less DND and more Cards Against Humanity. The kind of kid who likes to do all the things and enjoys friendly competition will feel most at home there.
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I definitely think checking out some of the women’s colleges, not least Bryn Mawr and Mt Holyoke, would be a good idea given your stage of the process.
Again, she has plenty of time to decide whether or not that is something she would be interested in when actually applying. But since you are at the inspiration stage, I think looking at colleges like this can in fact be very inspiring for young women like your kid, even if they ultimately decide it isn’t for them.
And in fact, Vassar, a former women’s college that has long ago gone co-ed, should probably be on that list too. My S24 is very interested in Vassar and I think it does continue to have a lot of that vibe in a way distinct from many other Northeast now-coed LACs.
In fact, it seems pretty common in my circles for nerdy women to look at both Vassar and Bryn Mawr specifically (the latter because it has the BiCo relationship with Haverford, itself a pretty nerdy college), and maybe Barnard which is part of Columbia.
I’ll put in a plug for Carnegie Mellon, which I affectionately refer to as “The Nerd Farm”. When I attended in the 1980s one college guide referred to the student body as “fruits and nuts” because of the institution’s strengths in both the performing arts and engineering. As a liberal arts student I was required to take a programming class where the entire grade was based on writing and debugging a program in three hours - one bad line of code and you failed. In our required philosophy class half the semester was spent reading Locke, Mill and Hobbes (but no Marx and Russeau), and the second half was spent solving Boolean logic problems (with half the sections doing the work on computers, because… Nerd Farm).
And the liberal arts students had it easy. It was not uncommon for the mean grade on a circuits exam to be in the low 20s. The CompSci students kept track of how long they were logged onto the DEC20s (the record was 32 hours), and you better not leave your work station undefended while you go to the bathroom. Back in the days before grade inflation engineers would dance across the quad if they were pulling a 2.3.
And nerds gotta nerd. Creative Anachronisms (people whacking at each other with cardboard and foam swords while dressed as medieval knights) was a thing, and it was not uncommon for robots to be seen navigating obstacle courses on the quad. To entice students to attend football games, the the team handed out floppy disks to students at the stadium.
And yet the school did - and does today - promotes programs where students from different disciplines work together. Industrial designers and engineers work on human interface projects. There is an entire program for Engineering and Public Policy. There is even a Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts major.
I don’t think CMU is as much of a grind as it was in the 1980s, like most US universities. It still has an eclectic mix of students from fields ranging from musical theater and design, to business and public policy, to engineering and CompSci.
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I know it’s been mentioned multiple times upthread, but I have to reiterate how squarely this applies to Rice. On one of her first visits back home during freshman year, my mildly-autistic/ADHD D22 enthusiastically said of Rice, “Dad, it’s like everyone there is neurodivergent!!” It’s the kind of place where kids spend free time making Powerpoints about their particular intellectual obsessions and then have a party to present these to each other. I would say UChicago has a similar atmosphere in many ways - D22 loved our visit there - but it seems to have a slightly more intense vibe, whereas Rice is a little more chill. But that’s really nitpicking, as I think a certain kind of kid would do well at either place.
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I am loving the nerdy anecdotes and stories in this thread 
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CWRU for sure!!!
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Rice and Emory.
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I think CWRU is similar to, but a step behind, CMU. While not as highly ranked as it’s Pittsburgh rival, it is a strong school that ranks well in various fields like engineering, nursing, business, the sciences and the performing arts. Like The Nerd Farm, Case is located in a nice neighborhood in a recovering rust belt city. Because the school encourages and facilitates double majors and minors, you will find students taking classes in different colleges within the university; for example, our tour guide was a MechE major with an Econ minor. If you are planning to apply to CMU, you may also want to look at Case.
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To highlight your last sentence, Chicago was my top choice in high school, but I wound up at Duke after it offered a great merit/financial aid package. I knew going in not only what I wanted to study but that I wanted to get a PhD and go into academia (which I did). I had some amazing professors and met a lot of highly motivated, nerdy students. Admittedly, my majors were in departments that were much smaller and more discussion-based than most (Classics and Earth & Ocean Sciences).
There is a tendency on CC to anthropomorphize colleges as if they are distinct individuals, but they do not have collective personalities. Virtually every top college has a fair number of nerds as well as “work hard, play hard” pre-professional types even when it has more of one than the other.
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I would add to the ode to Carnegie Mellon that the biggest event of the year is Spring Carnival, and the most prominent features of Spring Carnival are two nerdy activities called Booth and Buggy.
Booth involves organizations spending sleepless nights to build freestanding 2-story carnival booths with games. Buggy is an athletic competition in which cigar-shaped, self-designed carts (pushed from the outside by organization members and driven on the inside by very small drivers) race against each other on 5 campus hills. Practices for that happen all year…at midnight or starting at 4 am.
These activities represent some of the nerdy cross-disciplinary interactions that happen every day on campus.
(Full disclosure: I was a buggy driver. I would certainly no longer fit in one, or have the nerves to maneuver it!)
I realize you’re not at all “chancing” her yet, given that she just started her sophomore year - but can you give a general sense in which decile she falls? No sense throwing out names of colleges for “straight A” students, if those would seem unattainable to her.
PS: Funny you mentioned D&D - I never thought of my daughter as “nerdy”; that was until she was trying to find new social circles in a new city and joined the D&D scene which has weekly meets in various pubs throughout town – and made great friendships.
And later she joined a well-run adult soccer league, with the same result.
Sorry, no latin 
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Sounds like so much fun!
We love to attend UC Davis Picnic Day and watch the parade, because there are always amazing parade floats created by academic departments and labs, and always a group of “bikes” that are really just crazy wheeled vehicles welded together out of bikes (like something out of a Dr Seuss book). It is a wonderfully nerdy and celebratory event.
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She’s a straight A student so far, taking the max APs available at her HS, first chair cello in the top orchestra (out of 4 orchestras at her HS), she also attends a relatively prestigious auditioned pre-college conservatory program where she’s a composition student, and typically does sciency and art things in the summers. But I think it’s impossible to know what her academic portfolio will look like at the end of 10th and then end of 11th grade … she’s never taken any standardized tests yet either (and they don’t even OFFER the psat at her school any more). So, who knows. It’s all an inspirational exercise at this point, but VERY helpful to think about.
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I just want to emphasize I think you are approaching this the exact right way at this point.
I think it is very easy for kids to end up trapped in the mindset of, “I can maybe get into these very selective schools, so I should want to go to these schools.” That of course is backward, you should first figure out what schools you would want to go to, and then figure out if you can get admitted. And if the answer is an easy yes, that is a good thing not a bad thing.
So for now, I think it is great to just ignore selectivity. Which doesn’t mean only looking at the most famous and therefore often most selective colleges. Just the opposite, she can and should be inspired by any college that fits her friendly/nerdy goal, famous/selective or less famous/selective.
Not that people who are asking questions are trying to suggest otherwise, they are trying to give you the most helpful information they can. But I personally agree you don’t yet need to do that exercise, and I know they will be waiting here to help when you do.
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I can’t speak for every school but there are ‘nerdy’ people at pretty much any large public University.
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Ahhhh the smell of buggy teams heating the proprietary compounds in their wheels immediately before a race and protecting their buggy designs like nuclear launch codes.
Well - my “nerd” was also in the select ensemble of the string orchestra, having practiced with the high school orchestra while in middle school, plus participated in a private youth orchestra. Her HS friend circle would geek out over musicals they saw.
So, FWIW, she ended up at Barnard (Barnerd?) and thrived. Yes, there was all the usual college-age fun: neighborhood bars, indy concert venues in Brooklyn – but nobody thought it odd that she and her peers would choose to take a free afternoon to enjoy a new exhibit at one of the many museums, or sit in one of the exhibit halls of the Met to write papers.
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U Chicago nerd is very different from CMU nerd IMO. I’d say OP sounds more like the U Chicago type. Despite the where the fun goes to die reputation, students are very happy and are nerdy in the “love to discuss the meaning of Lego Batman” kind of way.
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