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 n...
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 students’ heads conceptually, because it's kind of, although it's kind of the more fun part, it's actually the easy, you know, it's not so hard to prove once you think about it in the right way. And I always thought that was pretty remarkable. But when I learned calculus as a high school senior, that went completely past me. I learned how to do those sorts of problems, but I was like, Oh, I'm finding areas by finding antiderivatives and now, as a professional mathematician, it's like, yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s useful. Great.
EL: I think I didn't really appreciate either direction of the theorem that much until I actually taught calculus, which I do think this is the thing that happens all the time, is like, you know, teaching these concepts, it gives the teacher such a deeper appreciation, maybe sometimes more for the teacher than the student, although hopefully not entirely.
KS: Well, I totally relate to that. I'm not a traditional math teacher. I just make videos on social media. But I enjoy making the videos because it helps me deepen my own understanding of subjects. And I find that it forces me to think of of theorems and concepts in different ways. When I've sat down and thinking, how am I going to explain this to somebody who is only hearing this for the first time? And it gives me a deeper relationship with with a lot of math theorems.
KK: Yeah. So you were a student at Waterloo. They have a very strong math department. What was that like for you as a student? I mean, was there anything in particular that you really liked besides the fundamental theorem, of course, was there a particular branch of mathematics that you were drawn to, or anything like that?
KS: My major was in mathematical finance, which was, like, half pure math and half finance, like actuarial science. I initially wanted to go down a path of doing statistics and maybe working in like data or with a bank. I ended up taking a very unconventional path, doing Tiktoks and going on Canada's drag race, as one does.
KK: Yes.
KS: And now I found myself in this world of being a math communicator like yourselves, and just talking about math and enhancing public understanding and engagement with math.
EL: Yeah. So getting back to the fundamental theorem of calculus, can you tell us a little bit about you know, maybe your appreciation of it. Was it something that you really saw the profundity of when you first encountered it, or is it something that's kind of grown over time?
KS: I think what's great about theorems is that in the beginning you may look at it and just see it as a bunch of words on the page. But once you really wrap your head around it, I think theorems can become obvious, and thinking of integration and differentiation as inverse processes of each other can seem confusing, but the way I like to think about it that makes it obvious to me is I think about integration like you're doing a sum, right? Because when you're finding the area by dividing a region into rectangles, you're adding up those areas. So you're taking a sum, you're adding up the regions of positive area, subtracting the regions of negative area, and finding a total area. The key insight is that if the curve you're dealing with is actually a derivative and represents a rate of change, then doing integration is equivalent to adding up a bunch of changes and adding the positive changes, subtracting the negative changes, and just looking at the total change, which is the same thing as just zooming out and looking at the big picture of where the function started and finished and observing the total change. So that's how I like to think about the fundamental theorem of calculus. It's small changes add up to big changes.
EL: Nice.
KK: Cool. So the other thing on this podcast is we ask our guests to pair their theorem with something, and this is often the most challenging part. What have you chosen to pair with the fundamental theorem?
KS: I pair the theorem with hiking up a mountain. So last year, I climbed up Acatenango volcano in Guatemala, which was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. It was, like, a six-hour hike before we reached the base camp, like one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. But what I noticed is that you don't climb at a constant slope, right? There are times when the slope is flat, and maybe even some moments where you're going downhill for a bit in order to reach the next bit. So to give an example, imagine you're hiking up a mountain, going from point A to point B, and you want to find out the overall change in elevation. So let's say that point A, the starting point, is 500 meters above sea level. In the first hour, you ascend 100 meters. In the second hour, you descend 50 meters, and in the third and final hour you ascend 200 meters to arrive at point B, which is 750 meters above sea level. The question is, what's the overall change in elevation? Well, there's two ways to go about it. You can find the final elevation, which is 750 meters, and just subtract the starting elevation, which was 500 and the difference between 750 and 500 is 250 meters. Or you can add up the little changes along the way. So in the first hour, we climbed 100 meters, and then we descended 50, and then we climbed another 200 so 100 minus 50 plus 200 is 250 meters. And these two approaches represent the two sides of the equation in the fundamental theorem of calculus, because on the left hand side, you have an integral of a derivative. You're taking a sum of all the changes. That's what we did when we added up the little changes of elevation each hour. Those are technically derivatives, because they're rates of change. On the right hand side, you just have to take the difference of the two endpoints of the function, which is what we did when we took the final elevation minus the starting elevation. So I think that illustrates this idea that you can add up the small changes, or you can just look at the overall change. And I think that the the power of this example is made a bit more clear when you look at some of the higher-dimensional analogs of the fundamental theorem of calculus, like I recently was reading about Stokes’ theorem, which is like the fundamental theorem of calculus on higher-dimensional manifolds. And what it says is that the average of a derivative on the interior of a manifold is equal to the average of a function on the boundary. And when I first read that, I thought, okay, how? What does this have anything to do with the fundamental theorem of calculus? But really, all it's saying is that adding up the little changes on the inside of the function is the same as just looking at the overall change of the function. So in one dimension, which is what we do when we do regular calculus, the boundary of an interval is just the start and end points. So if you know your elevation at the end and at the start, that's all you need to calculate the overall change. But you can also calculate the net change if you know all the little changes that happen in between, aka the derivatives on the interior.
KK: This sounds like you just described a really good YouTube video. Have you made this video?
KS: I have! If you go on my if you go on my Tiktok, I made a whole series, okay, on calculus.
EL: Yeah, nice. Yeah, I must admit, it's probably a failure of imagination on my part, but I did not expect our drag queen guest to have hiking as her example on this. So, yeah, so do you do a lot of hiking?
KS: No, and that's why it stuck out as such an experience in my life, because I swear I was not, like, an outdoorsy person, but my husband is British, and we, like started out as a long-distance couple, and he, in many ways, is like the complete opposite of me. And in many ways we're like the same person, but he's like very naturey. He loves the outdoors, and he was the person that that got me into hiking and walking and birdwatching, which, by the way, I love the red-winged blackbird in your background.
KK: Thank you. I mean, I like them so much, I’ve even got one of my arm. Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I took that photo at a local place here in Florida.
EL: Oh, I just want to sayI live in Utah and didn't grow up. I grew up in Dallas, which doesn't have a lot of hiking opportunities super close by, but now that I live in Utah, it's one of my very favorite things. So if you and your husband ever find yourself in this area, please let me know, and we can go to go on a hike. And there are drag shows here too. So I'm sure we can hook you up with both of those experiences.
KS: It’s definitely on our bucket list of places to visit in the US, one of the reasons being that we love the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. So I think we have to go and meet Heather Gay and Lisa Barlow. And of course, you, Evelyn.
EL: Yeah. You know, various famous Utahns, yeah. So one of the things that I don't know, I'm maybe slightly embarrassed about, because it's off-brand for most of the rest of my life, is I do watch Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. I've got a little watch group here.
KS: It's, like, the best show on TV. That's what I tell everyone.
EL: It is so much. But yeah, I of course, it's because I'm local here, and I get to be like — my watch group, we actually, at the end of each season, we go to one of the restaurants that they went to at some point on the show as a group and like, do our little thing. And, you know, and then remember whatever stupid fight they were having in that restaurant.
KK: Do you reenact it?
EL: Occasionally.
KS: Okay, which housewife do you identify with the most, Evelyn?
EL: Oh, gosh, that is hard. I must say it is hard for me to find many points of identification. Honestly, what I'm I'm yelling at the TV all the time is, like, you all need to learn what an apology is. When you say that you're sorry, you'll know what you are actually meaning when you say that and what it means when you accept the apology.
KK: I think that's a rule for everybody.
EL: I mean, honestly, many, many people in this world could learn what an apology is.
KK: It doesn't start with “if.”
EL: Yeah, but anyway, yeah, I'm trying to think. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what, who the most mathematical of the housewives is. Although Heather had a storyline where she was putting together a choir that sang hymns in a non-religious setting. And that is actually one of my hobbies. So I guess.
KS: Oh, there you go.
EL: Yeah, I've come this close to, like, sending Heather Gay an email saying like, hey, come check out our recreational singing group. So Heather, if you're listening to My Favorite Theorem, please, come on, check us out.
KK: Yeah, okay. I wonder how many of the Real Housewives listen to us. I’d be curious.
KS: So you never know. You had a Drag Race queen that was a fan of the podcast. So you never know who could be listening.
KK: So do you tour much, Kyne? Are you on the road in drag much?
KS: I just got finished with doing a book tour all across Canada. I drove all the way from Vancouver out west to Halifax out east. I visited, like, 11 different independent bookstores talking about my book Math in Drag.
KK: So you drove all of that? So my son lives in Vancouver, and I've driven that bit of the Trans-Canada Highway from Vancouver to Banff. And sometimes it's a little sketchy. I mean, it's, they're still working on it, you know.
KS: Oh no, I didn't find that at all.
KK: Really? Okay.
KS: I mean, yeah, I just really loved it.
KK: Oh, I loved it.
KS: Because I'm part from the part of Canada that doesn't have as much of the mountains and that natural beauty.
KK: Oh, it’s spectacular.
KS: I’m near the Great Lakes, which, of course, is beautiful in its own way. But I just loved seeing all of Canada, and listen all the all the crap that I've got with all my drag couldn't fit in a checked suitcase anyway, so I had to load up the car.
KK: So I've always wondered that about, like, when you, when you go to compete on drag race, right, where do they film it? In Canada? Is it in Toronto they film it, or they do it, they film it somewhere else?
KS: It was one of the cities around, around, like, Hamilton was where I filmed it. I mean, we were able to bring five pieces of luggage, which had to be, like, a certain weight. I just brought it in, like, cardboard boxes.
KK: Yeah, I've always wondered about that because, I mean, you see some of these things. I mean, these outfits get very elaborate, and it just seems like they wouldn't fit into a suitcase very well, but you managed to make it work?
KS: Oh, yeah. Well, I like to think of drag race as a little bit of its own prisoner’s dilemma and arms race. Because sure, if you go back and watch the earlier seasons of drag race, I mean, the outfits were so simple. You could just buy something from the mall and then go go compete on the show, because that's what drag queens did on stage. But with Drag Race being such a global phenomenon, and drag queens being able to get rich, then every season, queens just raised the bar and started bringing in custom outfits and working with haute couture designers. And each season, it feels like the bar is being raised. And I mean nowadays, like you have to go into debt to get on the show, and there's not even a guarantee that you make that money back. So it's its own economic arms race.
KK: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it gets pretty — the most recent one the global All Stars we're watching where Alyssa Edwards won, I mean, some of her outfits are just ridiculous. And you think, I mean, she's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this stuff. She has to be.
KS: Yeah.
KK: It’s pretty nutty. Oh well, yeah.
EL: Well, I want to say one of my favorite things in the book is you talking about, like sewing some of your own outfits and the geometry of that.
KK: That’s a math problem.
EL: One of the videos on your channel that I really enjoyed is sewing this hyperbolic, I don't remember if it was a skirt or a dress.
KS: It was a dress.
EL: The hyperbolic pentagons. It is pentagons, right?
KS: Yeah, yeah.
EL: And that's so cool. And I just love that, you know, another of my hobbies is sewing. And, you know, the way that people think of that as, you know, maybe “women's work,” this domestic task that isn't scientific or something, and it's like.
KS: My gosh, it's totally mathematical.
EL: It’s the most geometrical.
KS: Yeah, the most, like, you're constantly, like, splitting an inch down into eight parts and figuring out, okay, if I flip this inside out, will it work? And how to fit it under the sewing machine. A lot of mathematical thinking, way more than I ever thought.
EL: I mean, the number of times I've installed a zipper and accidentally made a non-orientable shirt by getting one of the sides wrong. It's not good.
KK: Sure. And this is one of these things. You'll mention this to people who are very good at sewing or other — you know, like, I once had a guy who was laying tile, and he said, I'm no good at math. And I'm like, what do you think you're doing? I mean, sewing is, is I can't sew.
EL: Applied geometry.
KK: That’s right. It is challenging and mathematical.
EL: You know, it's a manifold, the human body is a manifold with, like, you know, non constant curvature. Not even constant-signed curvature. You've got positive and negative areas. It's like, yeah, make a, make a two-dimensional thing that fits perfectly on this inconsistently curved manifold. That’s hard!
KK: It is hard. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right, so, Kyne, where can our listeners find you online? You're Online Kyne on all platforms?
KS: Yes I am. You can find me at Online Kyne on Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok. I'm mostly active on Instagram and Tiktok, and you can find a bunch of little short math lessons and fun-sized bites over on there.
KK: Okay, yeah, cool.
EL: Check her out.
KK: Yep, this has been a lot of fun. I'm glad we did this. Yeah, I'm glad. Thanks for agreeing to come on.
KS: Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the podcast. I love it, and I was so glad when you guys reached out.
KK: Oh, great. Good to know. See, Evelyn is great at this sort of thing. Well take care, Kyne. Thanks.
KS: All right.
KK: Well, folks, this has been the last episode of My Favorite Theorem, and we want to take a few minutes to say goodbye and some thank yous. So first of all, I started, so I'm going to go first. Evelyn, thank you for saying no and then changing your mind.
Yeah, this — we’ve been at this for eight years, and, you know, I think we've become pretty good friends over the years, and I've certainly enjoyed working with you, and you made this podcast better than anything I ever imagined. So I really appreciate all of that. And our guests, of course, have been, you know, real troopers and just so generous and thoughtful in their theorem selections, and pairings especially. And it's just been a lot of fun. So, thank you, and thanks to everybody else.
EL: Yes, it has been really fun. We started recording on Emmy Noether’s birthday in 2017 from a little apartment I had in Paris. And since then, Paris has completely like, changed itself. It's become, it's like taking cars out of the whole center. I'd love to go back there and live in a little apartment again, if anyone wants to help me do that.
KK: Sounds great.
EL: And yeah, it was just so fun to do. And yeah, I mentioned to you, the first time my now-husband asked me on a date, my answer was maybe, so I'm a person who just needs to take a little time to think things over, you know, think about what I want. And I don't know if we've shared this story before, but yeah, you approached me about this, and it was a time where I was really hustling for freelance work and didn't feel like I could take on an uncompensated project.
KK: Right.
EL: Which this has been.
KK: Sure.
EL: But it's been so fun. The reason that I said yes later was a few weeks, maybe even just a week later, I was thinking about, like, silly blog article kind of things I could do, and something that popped in my mind was wine pairings for famous theorems.
KK: Yup.
EL: And I realized, like, this wouldn't be that fun as a little list that I made, especially if it was only wine, because it's like, I don't know anything about wine. It's not that funny. Like, the title is funnier than the content actually could have been. But it made me think about the podcast you had pitched, and the idea of getting people to break out of their math teacher mode and have to talk about their theorem and pair it with something, whether, you know, food, wine, we've had sports, we've had, I think, lots of, some literature, music, just all sorts of things, just make them talk about math in a less, you know, less concrete way, a really impressionistic way, and that was so fun to me that I was like, yes, this uncompensated work sounds like it'll be worth it, with this person that I don't know, because I didn’t know you.
KK: We didn’t know each other, right.
EL: Yeah, I had seen your writing, but I did not know you as a person. So I was like, and then, of course, I was like, well, if I don't like it, I can just, you know, do it a few times and stop.
KK: Stop, yeah.
No contract. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I really appreciate that you asked me to do it and that you didn't find someone else to do it before I changed my mind.
KK: Well, like you know, I had certainly always admired your writing and I hope to see more of that. I mean, I hope you've got a lot of projects going.
EL: I’ve got some stuff in the cooker.
KK: Good.
EL: We’ll see. I hope to be able to share some of that more. I've had a little bit of a lower time in terms of what I'm I'm outputting right now, but I'm working on great things.
KK: Quality over quantity. That’s always the thing, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I'm more in administrative land these days.
EL: Yes.
KK: Chair of the department for six years. Now I'm in the Dean's office, andit's not that I don't have time for this, but it certainly, it's become a bit of a crunch. And, you know, our listeners have probably noticed that we've been recording less frequently.
EL: Yeah.
KK: I think both, because both of us have had other things going on, and weirdly, it's been getting more and more difficult, just to get people to say yes.
EL: Or to get it actually scheduled once we want to do it.
KK: Get it scheduled, yeah.
EL: Yeah, everyone’s busy and everyone's a little Zoomed out, and it's very understandable. But we've had so much fun. I love that we've had such a breadth of theorems, from things like the fact that there are an infinite number of prime numbers, or the Pythagorean theorem that you saw in grade school, probably, to things that, like, four people in the world can actually understand. And we've really enjoyed talking to mathematicians about all of these things at all of these different levels, and just see what makes mathematicians excited about their work and and force them to talk about their work in a way that they wouldn't if they were presenting it in a seminar or for a class.
KK: Right. There’s lots of hand waving that our listeners can't see.
EL: Yeah. They don't have a chalkboard that they can write on. Yeah, so I've really enjoyed that. I've I've loved the repeats of theorems that we've gotten, which people were so afraid to do. And we just love hearing two different, two, three, four, more different perspectives on one theorem, and like, what grabbed one person or what it reminds a different person of just talking about it in a different way. And I think you need to be exposed to math concepts a few times anyway before they really start to stick. That's why teaching is so great. Because when you when you learned it in the class, you probably didn't understand it the way you do when you teach it, because you've seen it more and thought about it in more different ways. So yeah, I’ve loved sharing, sharing the repeats and the one that you know, the unique ones.
KK: So yeah, been been great. Yup. It's been great fun. So I think it's time to sign off.
EL: Yeah.
KK: After eight years, all right, yup.
EL: Thanks for listening, everyone.
KK: Thanks for listening, and you forgot your little line you were going to use, about the best theorems.
EL: That’s right! I think you deserve the right to use it now.
KK: It’s yours.
EL: Our favorite theorems were the friends we made along the way.
KK: That’s correct. That’s right. Well, goodbye, everyone.
[outro]
In this episode, we were delighted to talk with Kyne Santos, a math communicator and drag queen who competed on Drag Race Canada, about the fundamental theorem of calculus. Find Kyne at her website and Tiktok, or on other social media with the same handle: onlinekyne. Her book is Math in Drag.
