A glittery Piet Mondrian-inspired jumpsuit. Rubik’s cube earrings. 6-inch heels and a wig. This was the uniform of Bryn Mawr’s 2024 Math Appreciation Week Keynote speaker: mathematician, social media star and drag queen Kyne Santos.
Kyne is most known for her educative TikToks about math and science, which she does in full drag for an audience of over 1 million. She competed on the first season of Canada’s Drag Race, and recently published her first book, Math in Drag. She’s appeared on Forbes 30 under 30 and was nominated for a GLAAD award in 2021. From an early age, Kyne knew she wanted to be a mathematician, but she wasn’t always so sure that path was open to her.
“I was always very gay,” Kyne laughs, “Before I could even speak English I was singing Tina Turner and Celine Dion. There’s so much stigma attached to being gay, I felt that I needed to hide that part of myself to be taken seriously.”
Kyne was born in the Philipines, and grew up in Canada. In high school, she started competing in math competitions, which eventually won her a scholarship to go to the University of Waterloo. It was in college that she first discovered TikTok and drag.
She started by telling math riddles. “I thought I was just going to be like the troll under the bridge, just telling riddles,” she joked. As time went on, Kyne got more and more positive feedback from her audience. “I always thought that I was the only one in this niche of people who liked math and people who liked drag, but a lot of people really care about both of these fields.”
As it turns out, math and drag actually have a lot in common. “So many people, they think of math as something that’s so boring, but there’s this other side of math that’s more about creativity and thinking outside the box,” she explained. “Math is drag. It carefully calculated self-invention. Both arts ask you to break from the status quo and create new geometries, new definitions, and grow.”
“I always thought that I was the only one in this niche of people who liked math and people who liked drag, but a lot of people really care about both of these fields”.
Kyne Santos
In between recalling her favorite unsolved math mystery (infinite twin primes), and least favorite math class of all time (differential equations), she dished on Canada’s Drag Race drama, her TikTok beef with Phineas and Ferb creator Dan Povenmire, her favorite Filipino snacks, and advice to the next generation of mathematicians. When asked by an audience member how to fight imposter syndrome in the math classroom, Kyne answered:
“I believe gay people have the ability of doing anything we set out minds to. To be told there’s something you can’t do, it really messes with your head. We have to get rid of this notion that there are math people who are just born geniuses, because it’s just not true. It starts with you telling yourself that you can do it”.
The crowd erupted into applause.
