Kyne Santos, author of Math in Drag, speaks at MIT
Math with drag queens and witty humor
Grace Zhang–The Tech
[Author’s Note: Kyne uses he/him pronouns when out of drag and she/her pronouns within drag, so this article will refer to her using both in an effort to accurately portray her identity.]
A personal look:
In her book, Kyne describes herself as “your ordinary drag queen who's liked math ever since she was a little boy,” and while that’s true, getting here wasn’t easy.
Kyne was born in Manila, Philippines and immigrated to Canada with his family in 2003. Because of his interest in stereotypically “girly” activities, he endured homophobic comments from his classmates in school even before he experienced an attraction to anyone. As he grew older, he felt as though being gay was his “dark secret” and worried about not being accepted by his family.
“I think my parents were so scared, because all they had was a negative representation of gay people or a representation of gay people being comedians, actors, or not really doing anything serious,” Kyne told the audience. “I grew up with the unfortunate stereotype that math is a boys' club, particularly a straight boys' club,” Kyne wrote in Math in Drag. “It doesn't matter what you look like or how professional you dress when it comes to math. It's all about what’s in your head,” Kyne said during the talk.
Kyne is a brilliant mathematician. In his junior year of high school, he earned one of the top three scores in an international math competition. He attended the University of Waterloo on a Schulich Leader Scholarship, an undergraduate award program for STEM, and graduated in 2021 with a Bachelor of Mathematics with a major in Mathematical Finance.
While he was in college, Kyne was juggling school with his job of being a content creator. The YouTube channel (@onlinekyne) he’d used as a creative outlet in high school slowly evolved into not only makeup videos, but also daily vlogs and tutorials for wigs, props, and costumes. After falling in love with the creativity of drag through RuPaul’s Drag Race, Kyne’s channel “evolved rapidly into drag tutorials.” When the pandemic slowed her skyrocketing career, she switched over to short-form content and gained popularity on Instagram and TikTok.
“I’d do my work in school and then when I got home I’d feel fancy,” Kyne said, with flair. But he still felt like there was no direct connection between the world of drag and the world of math. That changed when a math TikTok she made blew up on the internet. Despite having no physical queer math community, Kyne was soon nurturing a virtual–and international–one of her own. “I get messages from people all the time saying, ‘You’re the reason I wanted to do a math degree,” Kyne said. “I think that’s just amazing.”
She hopes her work can introduce people to a world of math and drag that stems beyond first impressions or controversial stereotypes. “There [were] historical times when math was up for debate, like whether zero was a number, whether complex numbers counted as numbers… Getting over that leap in logic to accept numbers as these abstract quantities is similar to how we think about gender. Maybe there are different ways of expressing ourselves that don't fit the definition of what a number is, or what a man is, or what a woman is. As humans, we can change our frameworks and change our definition, because in math, it helps us understand more.”
---
Mathematician and drag queen Kyne Santos, known by her stage name “Kyne,” spoke at MIT on Friday, September 20, 2024, discussing her book Math in Drag. The event was co-hosted by MIT LGBTQ+ Services and Harvard Undergraduate Queer Advocates, and featured a reading by Kyne followed by an audience Q&A session.
Kyne began her drag career while studying math at the University of Waterloo. She appeared on the first season of Canada’s Drag Race before becoming known for her short-form math education videos while in drag on Instagram and TikTok, where she has over 2 million followers. In addition to Math in Drag, Kyne also started the podcast “Think Queen” in 2023 and the weekly newsletter “The Math Queen Digest” in 2024.
Exploring math, drag, and everything in between
In Math in Drag, Kyne explains concepts such as the nature of infinity and statistics while connecting them with math history and her personal experience with drag. She engages her audience with snappy language, breaking down complex topics to make them digestible. For example, she introduces significant constants such as zero, pi, and the imaginary number i as “celebrity numbers,” giving them personality and intrigue. Detailing the history of how the imaginary number i became a tool for solving depressed cubic equations, Kyne writes, “Del Ferro had been gone for a decade before his protégé, Fior, challenged mathematician Niccolo Tartaglia to a duel.”
“Fior bet it all on his teacher’s secret solution, hoping that his opponent wouldn’t be able to uncover the same trick. But his hopes were dashed. Tartaglia solved all 30 equations. Although his victory spoils included a lavish banquet at the expense of the loser, Tartaglia magnanimously declined, and Fior sashayed away in disgrace.”
Kyne leaves valuable life lessons in each chapter, whether it’s cultivating a more open-minded attitude, pushing boundaries to make extraordinary discoveries, or illustrating how perseverance through multiple failures can lead to success. Her book has something for everyone: curious learners will see math in a new, entertaining way, while the experienced mathematician can take away connections to the artistic world of drag. Kyne encourages readers to explore their passions and embrace themselves fully, no matter how unconventional and seemingly unrelated these passions may seem.
“Math, just like drag, can be a joyful dance that delights in applying rules while elegantly pushing boundaries. What we ultimately find is that by following rules, we discover ways to transcend them. Without breaking rules, we never would have discovered calculus, abstract algebra, infinity, or imaginary numbers. And without breaking laws, we wouldn't be achieving the liberation of millions of marginalized people across the world,” Kyne says. “We will continue to transcend the rules because every great discovery is born just over the boundary of what we think is possible.”
Telling her story
Kyne placed special emphasis on her queer identity in her book talk for Math in Drag at MIT. She read the preface of her book, talking about her journey while making the audience laugh with her witty personality.
“Despite my best efforts, my parents saw right through me. When I was 14 years old, they sat me down and asked me to come out of the closet. Honey, the jig was up for this bakla!” Kyne exclaimed, referring to the Filipino term for a gay person or boy who acts like a girl.
After coming out to his parents, Kyne began experimenting with makeup at school and learned how to embrace his queer identity loudly and proudly. Despite critical attitudes from classmates, Kyne cultivated a self that shone through in the “runways” of school hallways.
Kyne’s passion wasn’t limited to fashion and makeup. “My newfound confidence led me to a circle of friends just as studious and ambitious as I was,” she said. “I wanted to prove to myself that I could still excel in school despite being out, flouncy, and flamboyant.”
This zeal for learning became a love for math. Despite not being as dramatic as other subjects, math captivated Kyne’s interest because of its artistry and creativity, which she compared to makeup: “Math is art, chaos, elegance, freedom, creativity, and abstraction. It's so much more than just scrambling numbers and symbols around to get the right answer.”
During her Q&A, Kyne addressed questions related to her content creation journey (ever-evolving since 2013), queer community within STEM fields (initially difficult to find), and favorite mathematicians or disciplines within math (Alan Turing and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus). These videos became more than entertainment for Kyne, attracting a community of math and drag enthusiasts in her own niche on the Internet as she became a role model for others.
Building community, sharing joy
Sam Vinu-Srivastan ’27, an organizer for the event, first discovered Kyne through her Instagram videos. She began planning to invite Kyne, reaching out to MIT LGBTQ+ Services in fall 2023. In the following January, conversations between Kyne and MIT started. Around this time, MIT LGBTQ+ Services found out that the Harvard Undergraduate Queer Advocates Group was also interested in hosting a talk by Kyne, so student organizers from both groups came together to bring the event to life.
“Kyne’s personality shines so much in-person,” Vinu-Srivastan said. “Hearing stories, seeing the outfit, hearing her share so much queer joy, energy, and sass—it cracked me up.”
The talk brought together a unique intersection of queer students and math nerds to the room. The packed audience was thoroughly absorbed in Kyne’s talk, volunteering question after question and engaging with Kyne during the Q&A session.
When asked what their favorite part of the talk was, one audience member cited the number of familiar faces around them. “If you asked me to list who I thought would come, I could name two people,” the MIT student said. “But so many more [people] who I knew came.”
Kyne cherishes the community she has built through her videos. “I love being able to make my own curriculum and follow my own curiosities because that’s how I decide what to make videos about” she said when asked about her future goals, “and I want to keep spreading that passion for math and education.”