Science Friday - A New Book Puts ‘Math in Drag’

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

It’s a common refrain from elementary school to adulthood: “I’m bad at math.” It’s a hard subject for a lot of people, and it has a reputation for being—let’s face it—boring. Math isn���t taught in a flashy way in schools, and its emphasis on memorization for key concepts like multiplication tables and equations can discourage students.It’s not hard to understand why: Math has long been seen as a boy’s club, and a straight, cis boy’s club at that. But Kyne Santos, a drag queen based in Kitchener, Ontario, wants to change that.Kyne is on a mission to make math fun and accessible to people who have felt like math isn’t for them. Her new book, “Math in Drag,” is one part history lesson, one part math guidebook, and one part memoir. Kyne speaks with Ira about “celebrity numbers,” Möbius strips, and why math and drag are more similar than you may think.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Can we change math's reputation for being boring? Math doesn't have to be this challenging, cold, hard calculating subject that you remembered in school. It can be something that's fun and inspiring. It's Thursday, March 14th, and let me check my calendar. Oh, yep, today is Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. I have never liked math. I know that's a controversial statement, but it's a controversial statement, but it's a

It's always been really hard for me. Memorizing equations and multiplication tables, it left me with a bad taste for the subject. One person trying to break math's dry reputation is not your traditional math teacher, Kyn Santos, who's a drag queen and a mathematician. Ira speaks to Kine about her new book, Math in Drag. Kine is based in Kitchener, Ontario. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks so much for having me. You're quite welcome. All right, you know, at first glance, I don't see a lot of similarities between math and drag, but your book is an argument that they are similar. Tell us about that.

Yeah, you know, people think that these are two such separate worlds, right? We have drag, which is art and art has no rules, whereas people think that math is just full of arbitrary rules. But what the book tries to argue is really that math is about thinking creatively and working collaboratively and thinking innovatively and questioning our pre-held stereotypes and beliefs. Yeah, so tell me about your personal background with math. Did you always love it? I remember always being pretty good at it. It was always my best subject ever since I was a little boy.

Really? You know, my dad was, yeah, my dad was an engineer. He would just do my math homework with me, and I just always wanted to impress him. I started liking math and thinking that it was beautiful when I was in high school. my math teachers encouraged me to start writing math contests, which were like these extracurricular math tests, didn't count for your grades. They were just like an extra challenge. I know everyone was listening thinking, where can I sign up? But, you know, I loved it. And I saw through it a different side of math, where it wasn't just about using an algorithm that your teacher taught you. It was about problem solving and thinking on the spot, thinking outside the box. Yeah, I had a great math teacher who used to describe, geometry as elegant. You'd say the proof was elegant. So I really enjoyed that.

And for a long time, math has been considered a boys club. Was it like that to be a math lover who didn't fit that neat little box? Yeah. And I mean, I guess, you know, growing up as a boy, I sort of had the privilege of a feeling like math was sort of open to me in that respect. I know that math is, as you say, a bit of a boys club. I in particular felt it was a bit of a straight boys club. I felt that if I came out as gay,

that people wouldn't really take me very seriously. You know, I always thought that the stereotype behind gay people were that they were just sort of flamboyant, very vapid. I didn't really think that they could become mathematicians or scientists. So, you know, the book is really aimed at people who, you know, need to unravel this stereotype. I want to show people that anybody can be a math person, no matter who you are or what you look like.

That's really good. I want to get into some examples then of how math can be flashy and fun. Tell me about the different levels of infinity. I know when I was back in school studying George Cantor's Olive sets, right? There were different infinities, right? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, the book talks about Georg Cantor and these different levels of infinity. I mean, first of all, we have there are infinite numbers.

You know, you can start from one to. three, four, five, and then they never stop. But that's what we call countable infinity, because you can put them on a list. Right. There's an uncountable infinity, which is all the numbers just between one and two. All the decimal numbers like 0.1, 0.15, 0.001. It turns out there's an even greater infinity of numbers just between one and two. And the book explains why that is. That is a mindblower to think that one infinity can be bigger than the other infinity. Yeah. Not only that, but there are greater infinities even than that. You can keep taking an infinite set and then using that to build an even larger infinite set. Like there are infinite infinities.

I love it. Let's talk about, okay, speaking of infinity, let's talk about one number with infinite digits, which we all love pie. Pie days coming up very soon, right? This is a concept that most people are probably familiar with, and you use the concept of pie to make drag outfits for yourself. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, pie is the relationship between a circle's circumference and a circle's diameter. So, you know, if you're making a skirt that you want to fit nicely around your waist, you can take a measuring tape, measure around your waist, that's the circumference. But when you go to the fabric to cut it out, you're cutting out a radius to make the circle.

So you have to use pie in that equation. Wow. And so you, I was reading the part of the thing that. where you were talking about cutting out different kinds of circles that fit different body forms. Yeah, yeah. Well, Pi is the same, whether it's a large circle or a small circle. The circumference is always pie times the diameter of any circle. Wow. And you devote a chapter in your book to what you call celebrity numbers, the rebels and the punks over the number world. Give me an example of a celebrity number. That's right. Pie is one of them. The others are zero and I, the imaginary,

number. And I call them celebrity numbers and I call them punks because these are numbers that challenge our ideas of what a number is. We used to think that numbers were just things you could count. Like you had one sheep, two sheep. The idea that nothingness could be a number was something that was a bit novel to the Romans. And so that that's why there is no Roman numeral for zero. There was no year zero. Zero had to be invented, right? Yeah, it had to be invented. And so, you know, the fact that there are numbers that that we don't know exist, but that do fit into the framework, once we do accept the idea of zero as a number, it also opens the door to negative numbers, which is a hard thing to wrap your head around. But once you do, it's like, yeah, it works perfectly

for describing debt, for describing below zero temperatures. And it's a great analogy to drag because just as there are new sorts of numbers that we may not understand, there are all sorts of people that at first, when we meet them, we don't always understand who they are or why they're like that. But you want to have an open mind when it comes to math and when it comes to life. Yeah, especially when you get into imaginary numbers, which I've always had a lot of trouble with. Yeah, students have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. You know, I did as well. The idea that you can take the square root of a negative, you know, it's hard to imagine, no pun because a negative times a negative is a positive, zero times zero with zero, and a positive

times a positive is positive. So how do you multiply a number by itself and get a negative number? Yeah. Well, you just invent it. And it turns out that it works quite well in math. We can use it in computer science, in electrical engineering, in physics, and it has all of these applications and it actually works quite well, just like how negative numbers fit into our framework quite well. You can say, you know, numbers are this. and this is our framework and that doesn't work, or you can expand your framework and make it all the more fabulous and wonderful. We're taught that math has very rigid rules,

but you say it doesn't have to be that way. No, no. You know, this is, I think, the problem of how math is taught. We teach math as if we were teaching kids to paint by having them paint a fence. It's just all about like following these wrote rules, where really math is about thinking creatively. And, you know, the idea of accepting new sorts of numbers is one example. But a lot of, you know, modern mathematicians are thinking creatively and working on original ideas

and they're questioning axioms and tinkering with, well, if we tweak this, then what happens here? Right. And finding these connections. Right. Because you always have these things where if you're doing multiplication, a long string of numbers or addition, you do this stuff inside the parentheses first, right? Yeah, that stuff on the outside. So you have those rules, but they're not always agreed upon.

No, and listen, drag has rules too. You know, if you watch your Paul's drag race or if you go to a drag pageant, there are rules that drag queens have to abide by as well. So, you know, there are these constraints that we put on to sort of help us understand, you know, what drag is about and how drag is different from other art forms. Constraints oftentimes can help you be even more creative. And speaking of that, this concept. of illegal numbers makes me think of drag.

And the ways it's been made into a bad guy in the eyes of some people. Oh, yeah. I mean, I go on and on talking about my experience with the trolls online, people coming after drag queens. You know, I talk about in the book how math has been controversial and how numbers have been illegal. You know, when zero was first invented, people had a hard time grappling with that, that zero and the rest of the Hindu Arabic numerals were also illegal at one point.

Yeah. So how do you keep your head up against the people who say drag queens should not be teaching kids about math or even existing at all? You know, I just have to keep my head up and I just, you know, have to lead with positivity and light. I know that what I do is not for everyone and I'm not going to change everybody's mind. But I just want to lead with love and positivity and be a good role model and show people that we're more than just. to stereotype. Really, my goal is to change people's opinions about math and also change people's opinions about drag. Speaking of which, let's talk about your very popular TikTok page.

Yes. Where you teach math concepts in a really fun and visually engaging way. I want to ask you about the Mobius strips, which is something that you talk about on your channel a lot. Tell us what a Mobius strip is. Yeah. Well, the Mobius strips are great because there are. a great visual example.

You can make one with a piece of paper. You just cut out a long rectangle. You flip it 180 degrees and then tape it back together. And then you get this thing that you can play with that is one-sided. If you trace your finger all the way around, you end up back where you started having touched both sides because it's all one side. And I think that people like it because it's this visual thing that they can really connect to.

And, you know, TikTok has just been so magical because it's allowed me to reach millions and millions of people, people who wouldn't have otherwise looked up a math video, people who have graduated from school and probably thought they would never want to take a math class again, are suddenly now interested in math and wanting to talk about it in the comment section, talk about it at the dinner table. And what's your strategy for teaching a really complicated math concept to people who maybe have no background in the subject? How do you break things down in a way that's, so to speak, digestible for people. I think the key is really, I don't try to get them to memorize it like we do in

school. What I explain is, you know, why these concepts are the way they are. I try to really explain the logic behind things and also how they're used in the real world. I think that's what's maybe missing from our education system. Not only are you a mathematician and a drag queen, but you're also a musician. Let's talk about music theory. Because right, right, don't, we know that that musicians and mathematicians really have an intersection there? Yeah, okay. Well, I wouldn't call myself a musician. I suppose I'm a music lover.

I'll take that. I'll take that close enough. Yeah, well, I mean, over the holidays, I was just learning about math and music. And what's amazing is that music, something else that we think is so artistic, actually has a lot of math behind it, behind the way a piano was tuned, even a sound wave, whoever is listening to this right now, you know, so much math has to happen for the sound waves to be fed into the microphone and then through the speakers and then fed through the wires as encoded in zeros and ones. It's really brilliant to think about it.

So then music could be possibly a good way in, like a door for people. Yeah. I mean, I think what's great about music is that everybody can connect to it. You know, people really, realize that you don't have to be a music expert in order to listen to music on the radio and really appreciate it. And I want to say that you don't have to be a mathematician to appreciate math and to enjoy the masterpieces of math. And who would you say, because people always ask authors, who did you write this book for? Do you have a specific audience in mind here? I wrote this book for college students, high school students, adults, people who maybe don't have a great relationship with math,

I want to help repair that relationship and show them that math doesn't have to be this challenging, cold, hard calculating subject that you remembered in school. It can be something that's fun and inspiring and is actually present in everywhere we look around the world around us. I just want to show people

that you can just love this universe and math is the language of our universe. Yeah, that's another way of saying, and you say this in your book, that math is magical. Yeah, it is magical. You rarely hear people who are not mathematicians who are not involved with math talking about it being magical. Make an argument for me about math being magical. I mean, I'll talk about pie since we talked about that. Pie is everywhere you can use it to make a dress, but it's also got infinitely many digits.

and yet we only need a few of them to make a dress, and we only need even 15 of them to land rockets on the moon. The first 40 digits of pie, you can estimate the circumference of the entire observable universe within atoms with a margin of error, and yet it has infinitely many digits, and it may or may not have your phone number, your credit card number.

Encoded within it could be the entire works of Shakespeare and the Bible. I think infinity is just this magical concept, and yet it exists in our own heads. Yeah. And speaking of Pai, you talk in the book about how many different cultures discovered it independently, you know, that it was something that had to be discovered. Yeah. I think the other magical thing about it is if it is in our heads, then why did so many people discover it independently around the world? You know, you had the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, ancient China, India, Mesoamerica, all coming up with number systems, all coming up with their own expressions of pie and algebra and sort of landing on these similar math concepts.

You know, there's two schools of thought. You can say that math is sort of invented by us and exists in our heads or it's out there in the real world. Yeah. If it's invented in our heads, well, it works really well. And it is so good at describing the universe. And if it's out there, then where is it? Is it in the sky? Is it in the... Where is it out there?

If it's a physical thing, I don't know. Yeah. It's kind of spooky. I mean, in a good way. Yeah, so what do you say to people who aren't good at math, but would like to be good at math? Would like to discover what you have discovered? I would say that learning never stops at any.

age, even when you graduate school and you get your diploma, for me, I'm a lifelong learner, and I've always just wanted to learn more about this universe and the people we share it with. And you should never put any limiting belief on yourself and say, you know, I'll never learn math. It's like saying, I'll never learn another language or I'll never read another book. Why say that to yourself? I think we should all embrace an enthusiasm for learning because what else are we here on this planet for? And it also takes a good teacher like yourself to be a able to explain it to people who really want to know about it. Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. And I, you know, want to give a shout to all the other teachers out there in the world, you know, working in the

classrooms because they're molding the minds of this next generation of humans. And there you have it. Kine, thank you for what you do and for taking time to be with us. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Kyn Santos, author of Math and Drag, a really cool new book out this week. Kind is based in Kitchener, Ontario. And we have an excerpt of the book. book on our website. Yes, Science Friday.com slash math in drag. Check it out. That's all the time that we have for now. A lot of folks helped make the show happen, including Annie Nero. Jason Rosenberg. Rasha Eredi. Shoshana Bucksbaum. And many more. Tomorrow, we'll check in on the biggest science stories of the week. But for now, I'm Cyfry producer Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.