The Tartan

By William Curvan

On Wednesday, March 20, internet drag queen Kyne Santos taught an 80-person audience about the “magic and make- believe” that it takes to excel at her two fields of proficiency: math, and dressing in drag.

The event was organized by Carnegie Mellon’s chapter of oSTEM, a national professional organization for LGBTQ+ people in science and engineering. The event was also sponsored by student organizations and university departments such as CMQ+, College of Engineering DEI committee, and the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion.

In February, oSTEM members traveled to Anaheim, California for the oSTEM national conference at which Kyne Santos was a speaker. Kyne put the word out that she was about to publish a book and would be more than happy to speak at universities.

Kyne Santos is a drag queen who makes math-related videos on TikTok. Her content includes math riddles, real-life applications of math concepts, and examples of math being used misleadingly.

Kyne started the talk by bringing the audience back to her childhood, describing an energetic boy from the Philippines who liked to sing karaoke and “make people laugh.” She said that her performative spirit compelled her to start wearing wigs and other “girly” items. “As a kid, that’s cute,” but soon people started to ask questions. “Are you gay?” and “are you a girl?” were questions that Kyne didn’t know the answer to at the time; she was just doing what she liked.

Kyne came out of the closet in high school at age 14. She joked that her parents sat her down and asked, “Do you have something to tell us?” She describes the period in which she wore a full face of makeup to school every day as one of the most confident of her life.

She excelled at math, attending math competitions and math camp, and she was fascinated by the beauty of proof-based math. She wanted to prove that “I can be feminine and glam and still get straight As.”

She pursued a degree in math at the University of Waterloo and lived a dual life studying in the library by day and performing drag at night. She says she “confused and intrigued” her peers, but Kyne didn’t see the discrepancy between the two ideas. She says that both math and drag “speak in abstraction and metaphors,” and that the ideas from one field carry over naturally to the other.

She started making TikToks during the pandemic because she “got bored.” She believes the juxtaposition of seeing a drag queen explaining math in a fun, accessible way drew an audience. Currently, she has 1.5 million followers on TikTok and has appeared on a number of pop science podcasts.

She said that inspiration for her aesthetic came from Rupaul’s Drag Race and that the show allowed her to see the “artistry” of drag. Prior to TikTok, she was a participant in two episodes of the TV show Canadian Drag Race, but she expressed gladness that most people knew her for math videos first.

Kyne then began to talk math. She gave the audience a riddle: A dress and a pair of shoes cost $100 together, and the dress costs $99 more than the shoes. How much are the shoes? The crowd of veteran Carnegie Mellon riddle- knowers were unfazed by the trick, agreeing unanimously that the shoes cost $0.50.

Kyne asked the audience to consider “what is a number,” pointing out how a concept which seems so intuitive and immutable can in fact be socially defined. She began with the “natural numbers,” which are positive whole numbers. These were the first kinds of numbers developed by societies that needed to count things. Then, Indian mathematicians came up with a zero, which opened the door to the idea that numbers need not represent strictly physical quantities; debt or the absence of something can be shown with numbers just as well. Negative numbers soon followed, transforming the numbers into an unbounded set “stretching from negative infinity to positive infinity.”

Then, someone who was tired of not being able to solve all their polynomials came up with the imaginary unit, “i,” defined as the square root of negative one. In this new model, any number can be given as the sum of its “imaginary” and “real” components, represented as points in a plane which stretches out to infinity in all directions.

For those who perhaps remained unconvinced that you can square a number to get a negative one, Kyne simply retorts that “we define it to be that way,” pointing out that the whole of math is, at its core, a set of rules. Kyne argues that when the rules cease to be useful, we must create new models.

This, to Kyne, has an obvious parallel with gender. As society changed, mathematicians “changed our framework” so that it more accurately described reality. They “created new frameworks that are more powerful and beautiful,” rather than insisting on always doing things the same way.

In the Q&A session that followed (which included Kyne reciting the first 100 digits of pi), she was asked if she had any advice to give the audience. Kyne explained that in high school, she walked around with a “fake it ’till you make it” attitude. “I was ironically confident,” she said, encouraging the audience to simply “express yourself the way you want to.”

Kyne has written a book called “Math In Drag,” where she talks about her journey in the two disparate fields. When asked what her plans for the future were, she said she was considering going back to school. Above all, though, she wants to remain in science communication, likening herself to a modern Bill Nye, and hopes that there will remain an audience for the type of content she loves to make.