< Drag queen Kyne Santos explores how math is 'beautiful' in new book 'Math in Drag'

EMILY KWONG, HOST:

You're listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR. Kyne Santos was a student at the University of Waterloo when she began her math career and her drag career.

KYNE SANTOS: And I was like Hannah Montana at the time, living a double life, you know doing my math equations by day and doing the splits in some gay bar by night.

KWONG: If you watched the first season of "Canada's Drag Race," you know Kyne, or maybe you're one of her 1.5 million followers on TikTok, where she makes educational videos about math, science, history and drag.

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SANTOS: Zero point one repeating equals one. Let's see a quick proof. Let X equal 0.9 repeating.

KWONG: Kyne has always had a knack for math. Her dad was an engineer. And teachers were always telling her to enroll in math contests to challenge her skills.

SANTOS: You know, in math class, the questions you're given on a test are ones that your teacher prepared you for. But these math contests would have questions that were a little bit more about problem solving.

KWONG: And later in life, she started doing those math videos on TikTok while dressed in drag.

SANTOS: I just thought it was camp, to be honest. And then I got so many messages from people saying that they loved learning math through this fun new lens. I think that's when I realized that math is a drag queen. You know, it's fabulous. It's mysterious. It can be controversial. And there's a hidden universe underneath the surface.

KWONG: And in her new book, "Math In Drag," Kyne explores those connections from the very first page, which features a photo from her Catholic high school's Christmas concert in Canada. She is lip syncing to Lady Gaga's "Applause."

SANTOS: That performance was sort of my first time in drag. It was half-drag. I was in full makeup but no wig, sort of just leather pants, some combat boots. It was what I called drag back then, just my way of sort of playing, experimenting with gender, experimenting with makeup and performing.

KWONG: And you landed in the splits on the gymnasium floor.

SANTOS: Oh, yes, and everybody in that audience gagged.

KWONG: So today on the show, the drag queen of math as performed by Kyne - how math can be mystical, creative, beautiful and, most of all, fun. I'm Emily Kwong, and you are listening to SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.

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KWONG: So the first chapter of your book is called "Infinite Possibilities" - blew my mind, honestly. I never really thought deeply about infinity. But you say that in equations, infinity is actually represented by something called a transfinite number, and the transfinite number that represents infinity is aleph null or aleph zero. Kyne, how's this number used in math? Like, break that down for me a little bit.

SANTOS: Yeah. You know, when I was a kid, I used to have a girl at my class. She'd say, Kyne, what's one plus one? Two. What's two plus two? Four. What's four plus four? Eight. And then she'd keep asking me questions like this and catch me once I couldn't come up with the answer. And I think that was my first time realizing, yeah, the numbers really go on forever. I think we all have this intuitive notion of infinity as just a never-ending process. But then it was Georg Cantor who said, actually, there are different levels of infinity. And Aleph null is actually the smallest level of infinity. And Aleph null is the number of natural numbers. So if you think one, two, three, four, five, all the whole numbers, those are all natural numbers. And the number of natural numbers is, of course, infinite, but that level of infinity is aleph null.

KWONG: Right.

SANTOS: The way that Cantor described it - when he was, you know, trying to convince the world that there were different levels of infinities, he introduced this idea of matching. So if you have, you know, two large groups and you want to see which group is larger, instead of counting them one by one and then comparing the numbers, you could match them up and pair them up. And then in the end, you'll see if there's anybody left over. That's how you can tell which group is larger.

KWONG: And you did this with imagining an infinite number of drag queens needing to be matched up with an infinite number of wigs, I believe.

SANTOS: Exactly, exactly. You know, if you have a huge group of drag queens and a huge group of wigs, you say, each drag queen, go get one wig. And then at the end, if you have more wigs leftover, then that means that you had a larger number of wigs. And it showed that this is a mechanism we can use to compare two very large groups, even infinite groups.

KWONG: Right. In the example you provide, you're saying that basically, you could have this infinite number of wigs, all numbered. And if you were to remove the odd wigs, there would still be as many wigs as needed to match an infinite number of queens because that's how infinity works. Like, it never, ever stops. So you never have a problem with infinity. And I don't know. There's something kind of liberating about that idea. Maybe it's just, like, the scarcity mindset of our day and age. But when you are living in the world of infinity, there's always enough for everyone. And everything can go around, and every queen can be wigged.

SANTOS: Exactly.

KWONG: You write at the end, it turns out that infinity is smaller than we thought it was, larger than we thought it could be and queer than anyone ever imagined. It doesn't follow rules in any way. It has its own rules, which are not rules at all.

SANTOS: Yeah. And, you know, it's a great analogy to, you know, being a drag queen, being a human in the 21st century. We're always breaking rules, and that's really the running theme throughout the whole book - that math can break rules and math can be strange and mysterious. And we don't have it all figured out, which is, I think, the complete opposite narrative that people are getting in school, which is that math is all figured out. We know all the answers, everything is either right or wrong and it's all black-and-white.

KWONG: I want to look at the section that's called "Slaying Uncertainty." And you give so many examples of how a person can, like, use probability to make, like, calculated risks. But you also write that, of course, life is always uncertain. And that's kind of, like, fun and beautiful. And it's worth it to experiment without, like, saying to hell with probability, essentially, some of the time.

SANTOS: Yeah.

KWONG: How can we leverage the unpredictability and randomness in our lives using math?

SANTOS: Well, I think that's what's great about math is that it gives us the tool to say, you know, I don't know what's going to happen today, but I can use math to sort of work out what's likely to happen. And for most of human history, you know, we have been living with rules of thumb. But math has just given us more precision. And with more precision, we can take more calculated risks and get that error to be very small.

KWONG: I mean, you even write in Chapter 7, "Illegal Math," which I think was one of my favorite chapters of the whole book - you write about how you're writing this book during a time when dozens of anti-drag bills and measures were being introduced by politicians in more than 14 states in the U.S. I mean, that added a layer of risk for sure, I imagine, you know, coming out with this book at a time when, like, critique of drag is just getting very, very loud.

SANTOS: Totally. And listen. I mean, you bring up a great point. And for me, sort of being a drag queen in this climate, I'm weighing the risks of saying, what's going to happen if I spend the next year or two trying to be a full-time drag queen? The past couple of years, it's been scary. And we've had lots of corporate sponsorships pulling out and people sort of being scared to work with drag queens. And so you have to sort of take a gamble because I don't know if this is going to be a sustainable career long-term doing full-time drag.

KWONG: Yeah. What do you feel like you want people to know about drag, and those who are, like, afraid of it or think it's somehow dangerous? Like, what do you wish they would understand, especially when you're up there, like, teaching math and science?

SANTOS: I wish they would understand that it's just fun. And it's just about not taking life so seriously, not taking gender expectations so seriously. Anybody who's been to a drag show knows it's just a fun concert of your favorite songs. I recently was doing a drag story time in Texas, and we had a group of protesters across the street, which was my very first time, you know, being protested in person.

And people have strange views about what goes on at a drag show, and I just wish they would come in. I wish they would just read the book and see for themselves what we're doing, you know? People think that we have this agenda and that we're all, like, getting in meetings, talking about how we can, you know, make this next generation of kids transition. It's really not about that. You know, I could care less if people want to be LGBT. I want people to be themselves. And I want people to embrace the things that we have in common instead of being scared of the things that we - the things that make us different.

KWONG: Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose something you're doing throughout the book really is pulling back the curtain on drag itself, how it works, how queens are judged based on, like, these tiny details - like the length of their gown and the height of their heels - how that is constraining but can also spark creativity. I'm wondering, how do you see that show up in math, like, creativity within the rules?

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SANTOS: Yeah, you know, and people always think that math and drag are such polar opposites. On one hand you have a subject that's full of rules. And on the other hand, you have a subject, drag. And drag is art, and art has no rules. But I think when you look a little bit deeper under the surface, you see that they actually have a lot in common.

On one hand, as you mentioned, drag does have rules, or at least drag has standards and constraints. You know, drag queens want to fit within a particular archetype of what you expect to see when you come to a drag show, which is, you know, your lyrics, and you are exaggerating gender with makeup and with costume. But, of course, drag queens also break the rules a little bit. And math is like that, too. Math has constraints, and constraints don't necessarily have to be restrictive. And sometimes the constraints are meant to be broken. You know, our idea of what a number is is an example that I like because we used to think that numbers were just things you could count.

KWONG: Yeah.

SANTOS: And then another level of abstraction beyond that is the idea of imaginary numbers and complex numbers and taking the square root of a negative number. You know, you can encounter things like that and say, no, that doesn't fit my definition.

KWONG: Yeah.

SANTOS: But maybe we can change the rules. Maybe there are new types of numbers that we didn't know about before. And maybe actually the rules need to expand to include these other types of numbers. And every time that a mathematician changes the rules and questions what we thought to be true, math becomes all the more larger, all the more beautiful, all the more powerful.

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KWONG: Kyne, happy pride month, and thank you so much for coming on SHORT WAVE.

SANTOS: Oh, thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me.

KWONG: This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Rachel and Rebecca. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks as always, duderinos, for listening to SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.

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