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Kevin Knudson: Be sure to listen to the end for a very special announcement.



Eveyn Lamb: Hello and welcome to My Favorite Theorem, the podcast with no quiz at the end. I'm Evelyn Lamb, a freelance math and science writer in Salt Lake City, Utah, and this is your other host.


Kevin Knudson: Hi. I'm Kevin Knudson, professor of mathematics at the University of Florida, where it's hot. It’s still hot. I mean, you guys are, you know, you and our guest are in some place not so hot. And I'm, like, I’m in short sleeves. I got sweaty walking to work.


EL: Yeah. I've got a sweater and a thick scarf on. And I spent yesterday so cold, just like sitting under a blanket in the house turning up the thermostat by degrees, just not — we had a warm October, so it got cold so fast. Not a fan. My Texas roots are coming out.



KK: Yeah. Plus it's, you know, it's November 7. So we'll let our listeners think about what's happened since, you know, in the last couple of days.



EL: No need. The problems that existed before November 5 were always still going to exist now.



KK: That's accurate.



EL: There’s always work to be done, and we are thrilled today.



KK: That’s right.



EL: To be welcoming Kyne Santos to the show. Kyne, please introduce yourself. Let us know what your deal is, where you're coming from, all that.



Kyne Santos: Hi everyone. Thanks for having me on the podcast. My name is Kyne. I am a drag queen from Canada. I'm based about an hour outside of Toronto, in a little town called Kitchener Ontario. I have a Bachelor of mathematics from the University of Waterloo, and I make math videos on social media. You may know me as Online Kyne. I make videos really just about all of my broad interests in math, and I do it all dressed in drag.



EL: Yes, gorgeous, amazing videos. I'm gesturing, which our listeners, I know they always appreciate when we do that in this audio only format, but yeah, just really fun. And I think your your videos like really make math inviting in a different way than a lot of people who make math inviting do it, and I think it's really great. And you haven't mentioned it yet, and I'm sure you would get to it, but you do have a book called Math in Drag that I, as I mentioned earlier, I read last week, finally gave myself the push I needed to actually get it off of my ever-growing TBR pile.



KS: And what did you think?



EL: I really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed, you know, there's some memoir about, like, your experiences as a drag queen and as a math-interested, young queer person, and like, how you you know how you've kind of gotten where you're going, and plus some things that you know, not all — what am I trying to say? I'm trying to say I really, like a few of the ways that you, you bring the intersection of your queer life into math, and kind of help us see it in a different perspective. And see, you know, like your discussion of complex numbers and imaginary numbers, and how like expanding what you think a number can be, and like how you view that expanding, you know what gender or sexuality can mean. And so, yeah, I just really appreciate the overlap of that. And there's a huge intersection of queer people and math enthusiasts, myself included, and you know, I think it's great that there's a book that kind of goes out and explicitly does that. So I’ve talked about your book.



KS: Thank you.



EL: But do you want to talk about your book and how you decided to write it?



KS: Yeah, well, thank you. I appreciate that. And really, when I started making videos online, I just thought that it would be kind of funny and silly to see a drag queen talk about math riddles. I started doing the videos really just to be funny and to be camp, but I didn't imagine that there was such a huge intersection of queer people and math enthusiasts. But after posting, and after the videos started going viral, I would just get messages from people all over the world saying that they felt very seen by by the videos, which gave me the motivation to really just keep sticking with it, because I want to show people that being a math person can look like anything, and it doesn’t matter what you look like or where you come from. I mean, why not wear a big, fabulous wig on your head and a sequined gown? Because it doesn't matter. And I think math should be fun, and one of the big messages of the book is that math has a lot in common with drag, and I think that both fields sort of require you to be creative and to think in abstractions and metaphors, and to be able to see something and understand it in many different ways, whether you're seeing something algebraically and geometrically at the same time. I think that a lot of math can have a fabulous side and maybe a more boring side, right? Just like a drag queen.



KK: I mean, drag can be very conceptual. So my, you know, full disclosure, my wife is a huge fan of the whole drag race enterprise. So you're on season one of Canada's drag race, correct?



KS: Yes, I was. so.



KK: So Priyanka won that season, right?



KS: Yes.



KK: And Jimbo was on there. Jimbo, of course, is hilarious.



KS: A legend.



KK: And went on to win an All-Stars later. So yeah, we watch drag roughly four nights a week at my house, because my wife is a huge fan and the franchise has grown. You know, it's in every country of the world, it seems.



KS: Well, it's grown quite exponentially, hasn't it? Because it used to just be once a year, and then it really just snowballed on top of it.



KK: It kind of never ends now. It's always on. Is there much of a drag scene in Kitchener? Do you have to make your way over to Toronto most of the time?



KS: Well, it's a bit different here in Kitchener, because we don't have clubs and gay bars anymore, so it's a lot of drag brunches and, like, drag dinners. So we've had, we've had to expand. But the funny thing is, out here in the smaller towns outside of Toronto, people really are hungry for drag. It's a different audience than like the college students that go out to the gay bars in Toronto, but it’s, like, moms and dads and older people or younger people who don't have a gay bar to go to. And so we all have found each other and found communities.



KK: Well, that's great. I mean, drag shows are so much fun. You know, I've never had a bad time at a drag show. And my standard line is, if you're not having fun at a drag show, you just don't know how to have fun.



KS: Yes.



KK: It's just a blast. So, okay, this is a math podcast. We can talk more about drag, too, but so, do you have a favorite theorem? Why don't you tell us what it is?



KS: Yes. So in light of talking about math as a drag queen and believing that math theorems may have a side of them that is in drag and out of drag, my favorite theorem is the fundamental theorem of calculus.



EL: Wonderful.



KS: Which was introduced to me in school as like a tool for solving integrals. Because really what it says is that integration is like an inverse process of differentiation. And I think when I first learned it, I didn't really appreciate what that meant because when, when you learn it, you sort of learn it as a tool for for solving an integral, which an integral is like, you're dividing — sorry, let me start over. An integration problem is really essentially finding an area of a shape by cutting it up into rectangles and then adding up the areas of those rectangles and taking the limit of that sum as the rectangles get thinner and thinner. But that's not actually how people solve integrals. The way that everybody solves an integral is by finding the function’s antiderivative, which uses the fundamental theorem of calculus.



KK: Right.



EL: Yeah, I do think this is one that we're introduced to so early in our math journeys a lot of the time. You know, you like, probably all of us took calculus in high school. And if you take it in high school, you — I at least — hadn't really seen the creative side of math and the — I saw it much more as a rule book for how to solve problems, rather than this entire weird, lumpy, creative universe. And I think, you know, you, see it as like, Oh, this is, you know, the fundamental theorem of calculus exists to take integrals of of things. But it's like, it doesn't really, it's, it's much deeper than you realize when you're 16 or whatever, and learning it, than you can understand at that point.



KS: Yeah, I think if you really stop and think about what the theorem is saying, aside from just seeing it as a tool for solving a real-world application, as a tool for finding an area or finding an amount of money, if you really think about what the theorem is saying, I think it's it's quite profound, because here you have two separate problems, the area problem, which is about finding the area of some curved shape, and the tangent problem, which is about finding the slope of the tangent at a particular point on a curve. Who could tell at first glance that these problems are in any way related?



EL: Yeah.



KS: But it turns out that they are.



KK: And then, of course, there's the other part of the theorem that that students tend to forget what which mathematicians like the most, which is that what you started with, which is that differentiation and integration are sort of inverse processes, right? If you differentiate the integral, you get the function back. That's the one that that always just sort of goes over stude