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Math in Drag: Interview with OnlineKyne (Part 2)
3.6k Plays5 months ago
This episode is an interview with OnlineKyne, the author of the book Math in Drag. The conversation focuses on how to be an effective online educator and covers various topics in mathematics, including Cantor's infinite sets, probability, and statistics. The interview also delves into the process of writing the book and highlights the connection between math and drag. The chapters in the conversation cover the journey of a content creator, tips for science content creators, the concept of infinity, the significance of celebrity numbers, game theory, probability, statistics, and the ethical implications of math and drag.
Takeaways
- Being an effective online educator involves distilling complex concepts into concise and valuable content.
- Math and drag share similarities in breaking rules and defying authority.
- Mathematics has a rich history and is influenced by various cultures and individuals.
- Statistics can be used to manipulate and deceive, so it is important to be critical of data and its interpretation.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:54 Journey as a Content Creator
03:50 Tips and Tricks for Science Content Creators
04:15 Writing the Book
05:12 Math and Drag
06:40 Infinite Possibilities
07:35 Celebrity Numbers
08:59 How to Cut a Cake and Eat It
09:57 Luck Be a Ladyboy
12:44 Illegal Math
16:02 The Average Queen
25:03 Math and Drag Breaking the Rules
27:22 Conclusion
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Transcript
Introduction to Science Content Creation
00:00:00
Speaker
this week where we are on part two of our interview with the content creator known as online kind the author of the book math and drag and this this week we spend a lot of time talking about how to be an effective online educator so for those of you out there who are
00:00:15
Speaker
curious about how to take your knowledge, your passions, your hobbies, and share it with the world through online content creation, this episode is certainly for you. Also, we go through the mathematics in just about every single chapter in Kyne's book. We talk a little bit about Cantor's infinite sets and probability and statistics and how those fields have been abused in a fake news medium.
00:00:39
Speaker
So there's some great stuff here in this episode. Without further ado, I present part two of our interview with KIND.
Kyne's Journey: Makeup to STEM
00:00:53
Speaker
Now I have a brief section that I want to talk to you about your journey as a content creator in general, with a target audience of scientists who want to become content creators, but also anybody with knowledge that you want to share with the world. I think that knowledge and education is sacred. It is a sacred process. And there's a lot of our listeners that have thought about, hey, I know a whole lot about
00:01:16
Speaker
stone masonry or I know a whole lot about the physics of playing golf or whatever you know and a lot of folks out there are just waiting for the right time maybe when they retire or whenever they have free time they want to be a content creator so I want to ask you a few open-ended questions about what you've learned as a stem content creator
00:01:37
Speaker
Um, well, I started out, I didn't start out as a STEM content creator. I started out posting makeup tutorials from my bedroom, um, just playing with, with makeup and being creative. And I did that for about seven years before I started making math videos.
Value in Content Creation
00:01:52
Speaker
So by the time I started making the math videos, I think I was a bit burnt out, but I think that the common thread through all of my genres of content creation was always that I was
00:02:03
Speaker
doing something educational. I had something to offer to people. I had sort of a value proposition. I never just went on online saying, you know, here's me, here's a picture of my face. I think that the king of content creation is giving people value.
Success on TikTok vs YouTube
00:02:20
Speaker
And when it comes to STEM, I think that the work of a science communicator is, or a math communicator, is taking these super complicated math theorems or scientific discoveries and really distilling it down to what is the, you know, what is the 10 second version of this? Or on TikTok, it was what is the 60 second version of this? You know, I think the reason why my TikTok really took off, and not YouTube,
00:02:45
Speaker
was because it's really hard to convince someone to click on a 10 minute video about Pi, especially if they are not a math lover. If they are not the kind of person who wants to consume math or science content, it's hard to sell them on here. Watch this long video essay about everything I know about Pi.
00:03:05
Speaker
a 60-second video on TikTok much easier, especially if you're in full drag. You know, people are kind of hooked and they're like, oh, they're interested in what I have to say. And I think that that constraint of keeping it under a minute really challenged me to think, okay, how can I best explain pi
00:03:24
Speaker
in under 60 seconds to someone. And I think that keeping it short and concise and just packed with as much value per second as possible was really the key to the videos taking off. And that's probably the advice that I'd give to anyone.
New Section on Breakingmath.io
00:03:41
Speaker
This is a nice brief section because I don't have a lot of content prepared here, but just for our science creators and potential science creators, I will have an entire section on the website, which will be breakingmath.io. And there'll be a whole section just for science and knowledge content creators and tips and tricks and things like that. So be sure to check that out at some point.
00:04:02
Speaker
All right, without further ado, I'd love to talk about your book. I have, just on the outline, I took all of the titles of all of the chapters, my footy here. Now, I don't know what is your favorite parts to talk about, but looking at all of the titles here, I'd love to give the floor to you and tell us a little bit about the process of writing the book and some of your favorite parts of it.
Writing Process: Drag Meets Math
00:04:25
Speaker
Um, well, I, I sat writing the book in 2020, a couple of months after the TikTok videos really took off. Um, and somebody from Johns Hopkins University Press reached out to me and they asked, would you ever be interested in writing a book? And at first I was like, oh my gosh, like I can't imagine, um, writing like a whole 300 page book like that. So, um, I've never done anything like it before, but they really held my hand through it and they were like,
00:04:50
Speaker
It's easy. You just have to start with a table of contents and then sort of just build it step by step sort of like you were writing the tiktoks. So I set out to write and if you've watched the videos, you know, I don't always talk in my videos about how I'm like wearing a wig and a dress. Really the videos are just about math. So I set out writing the book and I was just writing about math, but then my publisher was like, well, kind of
00:05:14
Speaker
your readers can't see that you're a drag queen, so you have to sort of infuse the drag into it. And they challenged me to write something that was very different from a traditional math book because it interweaves drag, my life story, queer history into the math. So reading it, you really are getting math lessons and history lessons and a memoir and a queer manifesto.
00:05:39
Speaker
sort of all in one. And I think that the big thesis of the book is really that math and drag are not so different. They're much more alike than people think. You know, we think that math is full of rules and the drag is just this punk rock, creative art form that has no rules, but actually they have so much more in common. You know, sometimes drag queens do follow rules. You know, you don't let your weight fall off in a lip sync. You have to learn your lyrics.
00:06:08
Speaker
And in math, sometimes we can break the rules. And sometimes we do want to challenge those traditional beliefs about what axioms have to be at the foundation of math. So really, math and drag have a lot more in common than people think is the main message of the book. I'd like to talk just a little bit about some of the chapters here.
Infinity and Paradoxes
00:06:27
Speaker
Can you tell us about, let's just say, infinite possibilities
00:06:31
Speaker
Yes, that's a chapter where I talk about infinity and I talk about these crazy paradoxes that happen at infinity, the idea that you can have different levels of infinity. And that is something that I think was my first foray into learning that math
00:06:50
Speaker
really was something that's kind of mind-bending. The idea that you can have infinitely many numbers, infinitely many even numbers, and the number of even numbers is the same as the number of even and odd numbers put together, how does that work? So that chapter is about exploring what really is infinity and how can we have different levels of it.
00:07:12
Speaker
Nice, nice. At times, speaking of infinity, that topic we talked about earlier about circles overlapping and spheres overlapping and how many points.
00:07:22
Speaker
I have wondered at times if that is an original approach. I have no idea. I have no idea. It would be cool if it was. But I've just never heard that approach before. And it made me think like, OK, we have the work of Greg Kantor, if I'm saying his name correctly. I hope I'm saying his name correctly. I've gotten it. I think it's Georg. Thank you. It's George without an E at the end. I appreciate the correction. Did you know that I have two one-star reviews on my podcast because I mispronounced it girdle?
00:07:51
Speaker
I apologize. I read about Girdle. I'm an electrical engineer. I'm not a pure mathematician. So the work of Girdle doesn't appear as often in electrical engineering as it does. So I've read about him and I didn't know how to pronounce the O with the two dots on top.
00:08:07
Speaker
One star. Yeah, okay, one star. Handsled. Yep, yep, it's awful, but yeah, those two are still up there. Anyways, I was curious that, you know, his work talks about set theory, I believe. I don't know if there's, and I'm gonna use both the word geometric and topological here. I don't know how much work has been done in the work of infinity and geometric and topological from all paradigms. I know some work has been done.
00:08:34
Speaker
But there's many ways to cut a cake. You know what I mean? So I don't know. I look forward to finding out. I'll blog about the thought experiment and I'll see if it gets any traction or any other ideas and say, oh, yeah, this mathematician from Prague did that in like 1980 or whatever. I'm like, oh, OK, it's not original after all. But we'll see. We'll see. So awesome. All right. Celebrity numbers.
Influential Numbers: Zero, Pi, I
00:08:56
Speaker
Give us a little preview of that one. Yeah. Celebrity numbers. I talk about
00:09:01
Speaker
three numbers that I think have changed the history of math. I talk about zero, the idea that nothingness is a number, which we sort of touch on in the idea of silence music. And that was something that sort of shook people's cores. Because when you think about really what are numbers, you don't think of nothingness as a number. You think of numbers as things that you can count. You know, I have one sheet, two sheets, three sheets.
00:09:27
Speaker
So the idea of zero and negative numbers was a leap forward in the abstractions that mathematicians have to make. The next number that I that I categorized as a celebrity number was, of course, pi, an irrational number, a number that appears in so many formulas where we don't even expect. And then I talk about I, the imaginary number, another number that sort of
00:09:54
Speaker
broke history in that it broke people's perceptions about what math was. You know, when you first are in school and you're learning about addition and subtraction, you might remember your teacher teaching, okay, five take away three is two, but you can't do three take away five. You have to do a large number minus a smaller number because when you're explaining subtraction to a kid and you think of it as, oh, I have five chocolate bars and I give Sally three chocolate bars, I'm left with two.
00:10:22
Speaker
how do you take away five from three? So you think as a kid that you can't do that and that negative numbers don't exist. But of course you learn negative numbers do exist and they do have real life applications. And imaginary numbers are the same. You know, imaginary numbers are numbers that you can square to get a negative number because I is the square root of negative one. And a lot of students have trouble wrapping their minds around that because just like the idea of
00:10:51
Speaker
Subtracting large numbers from small numbers is something that we think is not possible. We also think it's not possible to take the square root of a negative number. But once again, I is a number that sort of broke the mold and broke people's ideas and frameworks of what numbers should be.
00:11:09
Speaker
Nice, nice. You know, the example of I, I'm actually personally a little bit bothered by how I is taught. It was taught to me in high school algebra, and it was just introduced as this thing. But to me, it just seems so arbitrary, so willy-nilly, and I wasn't given a good example or a good reason why I is allowed to exist. It just seems, you know, a random arbitrary thing, you know.
00:11:33
Speaker
I don't know. Now, there does exist plenty of examples that I'm aware of as an electrical engineer. And they have been made accessible in the video Three Blue, One Brown, sorry, the channel Three Blue, One Brown, any of the videos on quaternions, actually. And they show rotation in many, many different dimensions. And they explain imaginary numbers from a different approach where it makes complete sense. And so I'll have to put that
00:12:02
Speaker
video as well in the show notes for this conversation because I was bugged for probably 11 years of my life until I got my grad degree. And I understood it better. So now it makes sense. So yeah. Do you know of three blue, one brown?
00:12:15
Speaker
Yes, his videos are amazing. Yeah. He is phenomenal. Just pure mathematics discussed in a calm way, kind of like Mr. Rogers. Or maybe I think he would be the true Bob Ross of mathematics. There exist channels that try to... I think so. Yeah. His name is Grant Sanderson. Very cool dude. Awesome. Cool. Cool.
Game Theory and RuPaul's Drag Race
00:12:35
Speaker
Awesome. All right. Tell us a little bit about how to cut a cake and eat it.
00:12:39
Speaker
Oh, that chapter, I love that one. That's about game theory, which I think maybe is a little bit more economics than math. But because it was something that I studied when I was in university, because I went to school for mathematical finance, so I had to take economics classes. So that's how I ended up in a game theory class. But I just loved it. The idea of math behind strategies, the math of auctions. I even talk a little bit about the game theory of being on RuPaul's Drag Race.
00:13:07
Speaker
really game theory is about sort of the math of strategies and how to win and how to cut a cake fairly so that everybody who's in on it feels like they have an equal share. And that is a little bit, it's not necessarily doing math with numbers and these hard formulas, but you're doing math with people's rationalities and people's feelings, which makes things a little bit complicated.
00:13:33
Speaker
Oh my gosh, I love that. That's where math gets, yeah, hairy. That's crazy because value, the difficult part of it is you can't always understand the value, like sentimental value, for example. How do you include that in a spreadsheet? You know what I mean? Like, what is crazy? Like, you can't, there's hints of sentimental value. I think, you know, really good marketing
00:13:57
Speaker
channels like the Hallmark channel really capitalize on the sentiment there. You know, like they're very good at that. That's a fascinating topic. And look at this. As a math podcaster, I have my own area of expertise. I suddenly get very curious about areas that I'm not the expert in. We're going to be building a pretty massive blog on other topics. And I don't know. Do you have a blog? Do you have a write?
00:14:19
Speaker
Yes, I actually just started it a couple weeks ago. I started a newsletter. It's called The Math Queen Digest. Oh, fabulous, fabulous. Here's why I mentioned that. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say because I have someone who handles the business side.
00:14:34
Speaker
I'll just let you know she may have an addendum to this but I am very very very much wanting to get interesting blog submissions from people who know stuff that I don't know just because I love hearing about this kind of stuff and I know again please I say this with the asterisk that my
00:14:52
Speaker
business side has to be the one to actually say that. But just so you know, I'm thinking very much about that. And I just, I don't know, there's so many areas of math that I need to be more well rounded in. And I didn't think about the difficult parts of economics and math, you know, so, you know, we have a little bit of an open call for people who have contributions in areas, you know, in various areas. So, well, I'd love to do a guest post.
00:15:15
Speaker
Oh, we love that. Awesome. I could not be more ecstatic. Oh, awesome. Thank you. Thank you. That's on the transcript. So I'll send that right on over to my lovely business partner, Autumn, and she'll get back to you. Awesome. Okay. Okay. Fabulous. And anybody else who's listening to this, if you have an interesting take on mathematics, if you have an angle that's not popularized or you're good at explaining math and I don't know, psychology or a niche part of art or
00:15:45
Speaker
something, something, please get in touch with us with breaking math. We want to popularize unique paradigms and unique applications in mathematics. We need that. Okay, next one. Luck be a lady boy. That's the chapter about probability. It covers probability paradoxes like the Monty Hall problem. And it also covers, you know, it's an approach to defining what exactly probability is. Because as it happens, mathematicians don't
00:16:13
Speaker
have 100% of an idea of how to define it. You can have probability as flipping a coin and something that exists in nature that's independent of us, or you can have what mathematicians call the Bayesian approach, which is that probability is your personal belief. And if you know the card that's going to be on the top of the deck, then you have 100% probability of what that card is going to be.
00:16:38
Speaker
defining what probability really means, whether it's something that's in your head or whether that's something that's in nature. And talking about fun probability paradoxes, that's what that chapter is about. Nice, nice, fantastic. I also love in your book how it talks about where these things developed. You know what I mean? Like, people just because I love history. So, you know, reading through it, you will see a lot of, you know, ancient Greek mathematicians, ancient Indian mathematicians, even Filipino history, because I
00:17:07
Speaker
I love connecting the people to the math. You know, math isn't just about theorems that you read in a book. It was discovered by someone. It was written about by a culture. And I want to make that connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the motivation behind it, too. Sort of like economics, you know what I mean? Like what drives ingenuity? Like need for things drives ingenuity. And that's how math keeps being developed, the entire field of probability and statistics. And it was just needed. I think Bayesian,
00:17:36
Speaker
What's the term I'm looking for? Tools and Bayesian. I'm not even warning correctly.
00:17:42
Speaker
Bayesian probability, I think started off with theology, I believe. Somebody was trying to show how you can prove the existence of God with incomplete knowledge or something. I usually think. I'll have to Google search that and check. But yeah, it may even just come out of questions about, you know, deeper philosophical questions, which drove the mathematics. So that's very, very interesting. Okay. Alrighty. And then after that one, we have the average queen. Tell us about that chapter.
Ethics in Statistics
00:18:10
Speaker
So that's the chapter on statistics. I talk about the idea of statistical graphs lying to you. You know, you always hear that phrase, there's lies, damn lies in statistics. I talk about how we can use statistics to sort of take control of randomness and see into the future, but it comes with a warning sign, which is that you have to be very careful of people
00:18:34
Speaker
using statistics for nefarious reasons. And in the chapter, I talk a little bit about a famous statistician, Francis Dalton, who sort of went a bit overboard in using statistics to quantify human intelligence because he ended up having a lot of racist ideas. He was like the father of eugenics. And he is sort of the example of maybe there's a limit and there's a line that shouldn't be crossed when it comes to trying to use math and statistics to quantify people.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I was just talking with my daughter about that and we're talking about just uncertainty and things that you simply can't quantify. Like you can't. Like, again, prior knowledge or my own life experiences and my own intelligence. I have, you know,
00:19:23
Speaker
my own experience, my own way of looking at things and there's no telling in a given situation what value it'll have. So there's a lot with humanity especially where you just can't quantify the value of it or even
00:19:41
Speaker
ideas or music or anything that catches on after an artist or contributor has passed away. You never know the value of something. So you're right. That's a very, very good ethical question. That's kind of like mathematics and ethics, you know? Another blog idea. I got to find someone to write about mathematics and ethics and the limits of human knowledge. Throw some girdles in completeness theorem in there and just make some interesting blogs on mathematics and ethics and business.
00:20:10
Speaker
and all that. Lots of stuff to be made. Okay, what else do we have here?
Exponential Growth
00:20:14
Speaker
Growing pains.
00:20:15
Speaker
Growing Pains, that chapter is all about exponential growth. It's sort of a chapter that's dedicated to my dad because my dad, before he passed away from cancer, he was the one who sort of taught me a lot about money and finances and idea of compound interest. I talk a lot about that in the chapter and other things that we can, other things that we can apply exponential growth to, like human population, over consumption, and just
00:20:45
Speaker
looking at the exponential function and how it's so the opposite of how we think. We think like in such linear terms that the human brain is almost incapable of conceiving of things that grow exponentially because they're just so sort of against how we would like to think. It's very, I'm forgetting the word. Gosh, I wish I had a weird word. Sure, it's all good. The exponential growth, they're very,
00:21:15
Speaker
It's something that we're not used to seeing in our everyday life. So working out the math of things and actually looking at the equation, you can see how actually exponential growth is everywhere, whether we realize it or not. Oh, wow. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Cool. That's one area and then a super very quick tangent. I think about that a lot.
00:21:34
Speaker
But then I think about, I don't know if it's the field of chaos theory that predicts when avalanches happen, but sometimes with my own thinking where suddenly I'll have a crazy idea that's unpredictable, you know, but it's not because it's just random, it's that
00:21:51
Speaker
I had a whole bunch of prior experiences that for whatever reason may be at an unpredictable time All related and the whole picture came together and I had this inspiration for something I mean like I don't know maybe it's chaos that is in part to describe for that But but but that's not the whole picture. Sorry anyways fun tangent, right? Do you believe that humans have free will no, or do you think that everything is caused by earlier events?
00:22:16
Speaker
Sure, I have a fun little cop out answer here, if you're ready for this one here. It is a, with the full disclosure, with the open disclosure that this is very, very uncomfortable. A very, very uncomfortable, an existentially uncomfortable idea.
00:22:31
Speaker
I'm very much only we don't have free will side only because of causality, and I feel conflicted that I have to accept causality in certain areas that have been very successful, but I have to make an exception for causality in order to account for free will, and I feel like that kind of grinds
00:22:52
Speaker
that's also uncomfortable in a way. You know what I mean? So, I also say I would love for us to have absolute free will, no problems at all. But there's also a thinker online, Alex O'Connor, who runs the channel formerly known as Cosmic Skeptic. It is now within a recent podcast. He also talks about it where
00:23:12
Speaker
Does the full description include that we only either have deterministic choices that we didn't originate or they're random? According to him and his sources, those are the only two possibilities and neither of them allows for free will. What are your thoughts on that? I'm also a determinist, I think.
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's just, you know, it's too consistent and it's too simple. It just kind of falls into place. I also may ask, I think it's perfectly fair to say it's uncomfortable and I hope it's wrong, but I don't think it is.
00:23:47
Speaker
I don't know anybody who... I think it's enough that we feel like we have free will, but I also think that we're kind of just animals that just respond to instincts. And that's a funny question because you get to do animals have free will, and that's what this book is about.
Math and Drag: Challenging Norms
00:24:03
Speaker
So this book here is about all of the evolution of brains all throughout nature.
00:24:07
Speaker
and you have varying ways that other things could be more human-like than we realize. We don't have concrete proof yet, but it's very, very interesting. Okay, now, since we only have a few more minutes left according to my producers, I want to give the rest of the floor to you and ask if there's anything that you want to talk about in our remaining few minutes. I think there's three left.
00:24:28
Speaker
Let me see. Well, I'll talk about the next chapter, Illegal Math, because I think that that ties into a lot of the major themes of the book. It doesn't talk about any single area of math like the other chapters do. It more talks about the broader ways that math
00:24:45
Speaker
has rules, like you can't divide by zero, and how, as I talked about before, drag also sometimes has rules. But math and drag both want to break the rules. The way that we discover new mathematical objects is through questioning pre-held beliefs about axiom systems, about laws and math and things we can't do.
00:25:08
Speaker
And drag also breaks the rules. At its heart, drag is about defining authority, whether somebody wants to limit what we can wear or what we can say or how we can choose to express ourselves in public. All the real progress is made by people who are willing to stand out and question authority.
00:25:30
Speaker
Awesome. I really thank you for sharing that. I hope it's all right. The only thing that I'd say in addition to that is, why did I have you on the show? Because you're a fabulous math communicator. You know what I mean? The style and the way you do that, that didn't play into my decision to have you on. I had you on because you have contributions in mathematics.
00:25:50
Speaker
It's the same in any point in history, like even with in ancient Greece, there was all kinds of beliefs that these slaves were superior, were in, sorry, inferior human beings and slaves couldn't do math. And we've got this whole video on the Breaking Mouth Facebook page about the story where Socrates proved
00:26:06
Speaker
that a slave was capable of understanding geometry axioms and actually doing math. It's a really cool video. I'll have to make it. But this is a story as old as time. It seems that it's an insult to human intelligence that we still have prejudice. It's an insult to human intelligence that we still force categories on whether there shouldn't be categories.
00:26:32
Speaker
And we use it for political gain, for scapegoating. It's a horrendous part of nature, but there's also hope. There's also hope because we learn to be better and even things where society won't let go of them and they're going to kick and scream. I think there have been improvements in marginalized communities across the globe. There has been progress, even if it's not enough.
00:27:01
Speaker
I still think there's hope. Back to the free will question. I live and act as a very, I'll say Jean-Paul Sartre's word, bad faith. No, I live and act as though we do have free will. I just am sympathetic to the position that we don't.
00:27:17
Speaker
All right, well, thank you so much,
Concluding Thoughts with Kyne
00:27:19
Speaker
Kyn. I greatly appreciate it. And that was our interview part two with the content creator known as Autoline Kyn and the creator of the book, Math in Drag. If you would like a copy of the transcript of this episode, please send us an email at breakingmathpodcast at gmail.com. Also visit the website, breakingmath.io. We should have transcripts available there as well.
00:27:38
Speaker
All episodes are available with no commercials at all on Patreon, starting at the $3 tier. And for any other questions, reach out to us on social media. I've been Gabriel. Thank you very much.