Business
Episode 95 - Kyne Santos
In Episode 95 of My Favorite Theorem, hosts Evelyn Lam and Kevin Knutson welcome drag queen and math communicator Kyne Santos. They discuss the intersection of math and drag, the importance of represe...
Episode 95 - Kyne Santos
Business •
0:00 / 0:00
Interactive Transcript
spk_0
Be sure to listen to the end for a very special announcement.
spk_0
Hello and welcome to my favorite theorem, the podcast with no quiz at the end.
spk_0
I'm Evelyn Lam, a freelance math and science writer in Salt Lake City, Utah.
spk_0
And this is your other host. Hi, I'm Kevin Knutson, professor of mathematics at the University of Florida where it's hot.
spk_0
It's still hot. I mean, you guys are, you know, you and our guests are in some place not so hot.
spk_0
And I'm like, I'm in short sleeves. I've got, yeah, I got to try to walk into work.
spk_0
Yeah. 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 a dream.
spk_0
Yeah. I'm just not. We had a warm October. So it got so fast.
spk_0
Yeah. Not a fan. My Texas roots are coming out.
spk_0
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Plus, it's, you know, it's November 7th. So we'll let our listeners think about what's happened since, you know, in the last couple of days.
spk_0
So the problems that existed before November 5th were always still going to exist now.
spk_0
That's accurate. There's always work to be done. And we are thrilled today.
spk_0
That's right. Be welcoming, kind Santos to the show. Kind. Please introduce yourself. Let us know what, what your deal is where you're coming from all that.
spk_0
Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me on the podcast. My name is kind. I am a drag queen from Canada.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
And I make math videos on social media. You may know me as online kind. I make videos really just about all of my broad interests in math. And I do it all dressed and drag.
spk_0
Yes, it's gorgeous. Amazing video. I'm just sharing which my, our listeners, I know they always appreciate when we do that.
spk_0
That's right. 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 and fighting do it.
spk_0
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 and 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.
spk_0
And what, and what did you think?
spk_0
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 like young queer person.
spk_0
And like how you, you know, how you've kind of gotten where you're going and plus some, some things that, you know, not all. Yeah, yeah, I like.
spk_0
What do I try to say? I'm trying to say, I really like a few of the ways that you, you bring the intersection of like 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 do that expanding, you know, what gender sexuality can mean.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
And, you know, I think it's great that there's a book that kind of goes out and explicitly does that.
spk_0
So I've talked about your book so much.
spk_0
Thank you.
spk_0
Thank you.
spk_0
How you decided to write it.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
I started doing the videos really just to be funny and to become, but I didn't imagine that there was such a huge intersection of queer people and math enthusiasts.
spk_0
But after posting and after the video started going viral, I would just get messages from people all over the world saying that they felt very seen by the videos, which gave me the motivation to really just keep sticking with it.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
I mean, why not wear a big fabulous wig on your head and a sequin gown?
spk_0
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 metaphor.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
I mean, drag can be very conceptual. So my full disclosure, my wife is a huge fan of the whole drag race enterprise.
spk_0
So you're on season one of Canada's drag race, correct? Yes, I was. So, okay, I'll go. So Priyanka won that season, right? Yes. Okay. And Jimbo was on their Jimbo, of course, and I went on to legend, winning all stars later. So, yeah, we watched drag roughly four nights a week at my house because my wife is a huge fan.
spk_0
And the franchise has grown. So, you know, it's in every country in the world. It seems like that.
spk_0
Well, it's grown quite exponentially, hasn't it? Because it used to just be one seer and then it really just snowballed on top of that. It kind of never ends now. It's always on.
spk_0
Is there much of a drag scene in Kitchener? Do you have to make your way over to Toronto most of the time?
spk_0
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 branches and like drag dinners.
spk_0
So 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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
And so we all have found each other and found communities. Well, that's great. I mean, drag shows are so much fun.
spk_0
And 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.
spk_0
Yes. It's just a blast. So, okay, this is a math podcast.
spk_0
We can talk more about drag too. But so you have a favorite theorem. Why don't you tell us what it is?
spk_0
Yes. So in light of talking about math is a drag queen and believing that math theorems may have a side of them that is in drag and out of drag.
spk_0
My favorite theorem is the fundamental theorem of calculus.
spk_0
Which was introduced to me in school as like a tool for solving integrals. Because really what what it says is that integration is like an inverse process of differentiation.
spk_0
And I think when I first learned it, I didn't really appreciate what that meant because when you learn it, you sort of learned it as a tool for for solving an integral, which an integral is like you're dividing.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
But that's not actually how people solve integrals. The way that everybody solves an integral is by finding the functions anti derivative, which uses the fundamental theorem of calculus.
spk_0
Yeah, I do think this is one that we're like 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.
spk_0
And if you take it in high school, you I at least hadn't really seen like math, the creative side of math and the.
spk_0
I saw it much more as a rulebook for how to solve problems rather than this entire weird lumpy creative universe.
spk_0
And I think you know you you like see it as like oh, this is you know the fundamental theorem of calculus exists to take integrals of things, but it's like it doesn't really it's much deeper than you realize when you're 16 or whatever and learning it then.
spk_0
Yeah, then you can understand at that point.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
If you really think about what the theorem is saying, I think it's it's quite profound because here you have to 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.
spk_0
And then you can see that the point on a curve, who could tell it first glance that these problems are in any way related, but it turns out that they are.
spk_0
And then of course there's the other part of the theorem that that students tend to forget what which mathematicians like the most is that what you started with, which is that differentiation and integration or sort of inverse process.
spk_0
If you differentiate the integral, you get the function back.
spk_0
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 a more fun part.
spk_0
It's actually the easy, you know, it's not so hard to prove once you think about it in the right way.
spk_0
And I always thought that was pretty remarkable, but when I learned calculus as a high school senior, that went completely past me.
spk_0
Like I learned how to do those sorts of problems, but I was like, oh, I'm finding areas by finding any derivatives and.
spk_0
And now it's professional mathematician. It's like, yeah, okay, yeah, that's useful. Great. Yeah.
spk_0
Well, sorry going.
spk_0
I think I didn't really appreciate either direction of the theorem that much until I actually taught calculus.
spk_0
Which I do think this is the thing that happens all the time is like, you know, teaching these concepts.
spk_0
It like gives the the teacher such a deeper appreciation.
spk_0
May is it's sometimes more for the teacher than the student, although hopefully not entirely.
spk_0
Well, I totally relate to that. I'm not a traditional math teacher.
spk_0
I just make videos on social media, but I enjoy making the videos because it helps me deepen my own understanding of subjects.
spk_0
And I find that it forces me to think of of theorems and concepts in different ways.
spk_0
When I'm when I'm sat down and thinking, how am I going to explain this to somebody who is only hearing this for the first time.
spk_0
And it gives me a deeper relationship with with a lot of math theorems.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
So, you know, so you're a student of Waterloo. They have a very strong math department.
spk_0
What was that like for you as a student?
spk_0
I mean, was there any particular that you really liked besides the fundamental theorem?
spk_0
Of course, were there particular branch of mathematics that you were drawn to or anything like that?
spk_0
My major was in mathematical finance, which was like half pure math and half finance, like in a tutorial science.
spk_0
I initially wanted to go down a path of doing like statistics and maybe working in like data or like with a bank.
spk_0
I ended up taking a very unconventional path doing TikToks and going on Canada's drag race as one does.
spk_0
Yes.
spk_0
And now I've 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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
Like was it something that you really like saw the profundity of when you first encountered it?
spk_0
Or is it something that's kind of grown over time?
spk_0
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.
spk_0
But once you really wrap your head around it, I think theorems can become obvious.
spk_0
And thinking of integration and differentiation as inverse process of processes of each other can seem confusing.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
Right? Because when you're finding the area by dividing a region into rectangles, you're adding up those areas.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
So that's how I like to think about the fundamental theorem of calculus. It's small changes add up to big changes.
spk_0
Yeah. 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.
spk_0
What have you chosen to pair with the fundamental theorem?
spk_0
I pair the theorem with hiking up a mountain.
spk_0
spk_0
So last year I climbed up Akatanango 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.
spk_0
Like one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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 their rates of change.
spk_0
On the right hand side you just have to take the difference of the two end points of the function, which is what we did when we took the final elevation minus the starting elevation.
spk_0
So I think that illustrates this idea that you can add up the small changes or you can just look at the overall change.
spk_0
And I think that 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.
spk_0
Like I recently was reading about Stokes's theorem, which is like the fundamental theorem of calculus on higher dimensional manifolds.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
And when I first read that I thought, okay, what does this have anything to do with the fundamental theorem of calculus.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
So if you know your elevation at the end and at the start, that's all you need to calculate the overall change.
spk_0
But you can also calculate the next change if you know all the little changes that happen in between aka the derivatives on the interior.
spk_0
This sounds like you just described a really good YouTube video. Have you made this video?
spk_0
I have if you go on my if you go on my TikTok, I made a whole series on calculus.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
So yeah, so do you do a lot of hiking?
spk_0
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.
spk_0
But my husband is British and we started out as a long distance couple.
spk_0
And in many ways, it's like the complete opposite of me. And in many ways, we're like the same person, but he's like very naturey.
spk_0
He loves outdoors and he was the person that got me into hiking and walking and bird watching, which by the way, I love the red wing blackbird in your background.
spk_0
Thank you. I mean, I like him so much. I've even got one of my arm.
spk_0
Oh my gosh.
spk_0
Yeah. Yeah.
spk_0
Yeah, I took that photo at a local place here in the in Florida.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
Yeah. All right. So we're.
spk_0
Go ahead.
spk_0
Oh, I just want to say like I live in Utah and didn't grow up. I grew up in Dallas, which doesn't have a lot of hiking opportunity is super close by.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
And we can go to go on a hike and there are there are drag shows here too. So I'm sure we can hook you up with both of those experience.
spk_0
It's definitely on our bucket list of places to visit in the US.
spk_0
One of the reasons being that we love the real housewives of Salt Lake City.
spk_0
So I think we have to go and and Heather Gay and Lisa Barlow.
spk_0
Oh, yeah.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
You know, various, various famous Utahans.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
So one of 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.
spk_0
I've got a little watch group here.
spk_0
And it's like the best show on TV.
spk_0
That's what I tell everyone.
spk_0
It is so much.
spk_0
But yeah, I, of course, it's because I'm local here and I get to be like, oh, we, my watch group.
spk_0
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, you know, and then remember whatever stupid fight they were having in that restaurant.
spk_0
Do you reenact it?
spk_0
Occasionally.
spk_0
Which housewife do you identify with the most Evelyn?
spk_0
Oh gosh, that is hard.
spk_0
I must say it is hard for me to find many points of identification.
spk_0
Honestly, what I'm yelling at the TV all the time is like you all need to learn what an apology is.
spk_0
And like, then when you say that you're sorry, you'll know what you are actually meaning when you say that.
spk_0
I think that's a rule for everything.
spk_0
You accept the apology.
spk_0
I mean, honestly, many, many people in this world could learn what an apology is.
spk_0
It doesn't start with if.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
But anyway, yeah, I'm trying to think I'm not sure.
spk_0
I'm not sure what who the most mathematical of the housewife is.
spk_0
Okay.
spk_0
Although Heather, Heather had a storyline where she was putting together a choir that saved him in a non religious setting.
spk_0
And that is actually one of my hobbies.
spk_0
So I guess I'll be.
spk_0
Yeah, I've come this close to like sending Heather gay an email saying like, hey, come check out our recreational singing group.
spk_0
Heather, if you're listening to my favorite theorem, please come on, check us out.
spk_0
Sure.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
Okay.
spk_0
I wonder how many of the real housewives listen to us, but that would be curious.
spk_0
Well, you never know you had a drag race queen that that was a fan of the podcast.
spk_0
Sure.
spk_0
Never know who could be listening.
spk_0
So do you tour much kind?
spk_0
Are you on the road in drag much?
spk_0
I just got finished with doing a book tour all across Canada.
spk_0
Okay.
spk_0
I drove all the way from Vancouver, out west to Halifax, out east.
spk_0
Wow.
spk_0
I visited like 11 different independent bookstores talking about my book, math and drag.
spk_0
So you drove all of that?
spk_0
So my son lives in Vancouver and I've driven that bit of the trans Canada highway from Vancouver to BANF.
spk_0
And sometimes there's a little sketchy.
spk_0
I mean, it's, there's still working on it, you know.
spk_0
Oh, no, I didn't find that at all.
spk_0
Really?
spk_0
spk_0
Yeah, I just really loved it because I'm part, I love the part of Canada that doesn't have as much.
spk_0
Of the mountains and that, and that natural beauty.
spk_0
I'm here at the Great Lakes, which of course is, it's beautiful in its own way.
spk_0
Sure.
spk_0
But I just love seeing all of Canada and listen, all the, all the crap that I've got with all my drag couldn't fit in.
spk_0
I can't check two cases anyway, so I had to load up the car.
spk_0
So I've always wondered that about like when you, when you go to Compute on Drag Race, right?
spk_0
Where are they filming in Canada? Is it in Toronto?
spk_0
They film it or are they doing it somewhere?
spk_0
They film it in like, it was one of the cities around, around like Hamilton.
spk_0
Okay.
spk_0
Yeah, all right.
spk_0
Was where I filmed it.
spk_0
I mean, we had, we were able to bring like five pieces of luggage, which had to be like a certain weight.
spk_0
I just brought it in like cardboard boxes.
spk_0
Yeah, I, well, I've always wondered about that because I mean, you see some of these things.
spk_0
I mean, these outfits get very elaborate.
spk_0
And it just seems like they wouldn't fit into a suitcase very well.
spk_0
But, but you managed to make it work?
spk_0
Oh, yeah. Well, I, I like to think of, of Drag Race as a little bit of its own, um, Prisoners dilemma and, and arms race because 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 them all and then go, go compete on, on the show.
spk_0
Because that's what, that's what drag queens did on stage.
spk_0
But with Drag Race being, um, such a global phenomenon and drag queens being able to get rich, then every season,
spk_0
queens just raised the bar and started bringing in custom outfits and working with like, um, oak couture designers and each season, it feels like the bar is being raised.
spk_0
And I mean, nowadays, like, you, you have to go into debt to get on the show and there's not even a guarantee that you make that money back.
spk_0
So it's its own, um, economic arms race.
spk_0
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it gets pretty, the most reason when the global all starts were watching were a list of Edwards one.
spk_0
I mean, some of her outfits are just ridiculous. I mean, she's, she's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this stuff. She has to be. Yeah.
spk_0
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty nutty. Yeah. Oh well.
spk_0
Yeah. Well, I, 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.
spk_0
It's a math problem. One of the, the videos on your channel that I really enjoyed is sewing this hyperbolic.
spk_0
I don't remember if it was a skirt or a dress, but like the hyperbolic like made all the, the hyperbolic Pentagon's is Pentagon's right. Yeah.
spk_0
Yeah. 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.
spk_0
And it's like, oh my gosh, it's totally mathematical. Yeah. The most like you're constantly like splitting an inch down into like eight parts and figuring out, okay, if I flip this inside out, will it, will it work?
spk_0
And how to fit it under the sewing machine? A lot of mathematical thinking.
spk_0
Way more than I ever thought. I mean, the number of times I've installed a zipper and accidentally made a non orientable like shirt by getting one of the sides wrong.
spk_0
It's like, not not good. 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?
spk_0
I mean, sewing is, I can't sew. It's very geometry. That's right. It is challenging and mathematical.
spk_0
It's like, you know, it's a manifold, like the human body is a manifold with like, you know, non non constant curvature, it isn't even not even constant signed curvature.
spk_0
You've got positive and negative areas. It's like, yeah, make a make a two-dimensional thing that fits perfectly on this, this, you know, inconsistently.
spk_0
It's really good for manifold. Yeah. That's hard. It is hard. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. So, kind, where can our listeners find you online? Your online kind on all platforms?
spk_0
Yeah. You can find me an online kind 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.
spk_0
Okay. Yeah. Cool. Check her out.
spk_0
Yep. This has been a lot of fun. I'm glad we did this. Yeah. I'm glad. Thanks for agreeing to come on.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
Oh, great. Good to know. So, Evelyn Evelyn's great at this sort of thing. All right. We'll take care. Thanks.
spk_0
Well, folks, this has been the last episode of my favorite theorem. And we want to take a few minutes to say goodbye and and some thank you.
spk_0
So, first of all, let me, I started. So, I'm going to go first. Evelyn, thank you for saying no and then changing your mind.
spk_0
And 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.
spk_0
And, and, and you made this podcast better than anything I ever imagined. So, I really appreciate all of that.
spk_0
And, and our guests, of course, have been, you know, real, real troopers and, and just so generous and thoughtful in their, in their theorem selections and parings, especially.
spk_0
And it's just been a lot of fun. So, so thank you and thank everybody else.
spk_0
Yes, it has been really fun. We, we started recording on Emmy Dirters birthday in 2017 from a little apartment.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
I'd love to go back there and live in a little apartment again. If anyone wants to have to do that.
spk_0
And, yeah, it was just so fun to do. And, yeah, I mentioned to you this, the first time my now husband asked me on a date, my answer was maybe.
spk_0
So, I'm, I'm a person and just needs to take a little time to think things over. See, you know, think about what I want.
spk_0
And I don't know if we've shared this story before, but yeah, you, you approached me about this. And it was a time where I was really hustling for freelance work.
spk_0
And didn't feel like I could take on an uncompensated project, right, which this has been.
spk_0
Sure. Sure.
spk_0
And, 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.
spk_0
And something that popped in my mind was wine pairings for famous theorems. 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.
spk_0
It's not that funny. It's like the title is funnier than the content actually could have been.
spk_0
But it made me think about the podcast you had pitched and the idea of getting the 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.
spk_0
And I think lots of some literature or music, just all sorts of things, just make them talk about math in a less, you know, less concrete way, a really impressionistic way.
spk_0
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 was.
spk_0
We did know your, yeah, I had seen your writing, but I did not know you as a person.
spk_0
So I was like, and then of course it was like, well, if I don't like it, I can just stop a few times stop. It's like, yeah, no contract.
spk_0
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.
spk_0
Well, like, you know, I had it's certainly always a myager writing and I hope to see more of that. I mean, I hope you've got a lot of projects going.
spk_0
I've got, I've got some stuff in the cooker. So we'll, 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.
spk_0
But I'm working on great things quality over quality. That's always, that's always the thing. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm more of an administrative land these days. I just, yes, chair of the department for six years now. I'm in the Dean's office.
spk_0
And it's, it's not that I don't have time for this, but it certainly it's, it's, it's become a bit of a crunch. And you know, our listeners have probably noticed that we've been recording less frequently.
spk_0
Yeah, 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.
spk_0
Or to get it actually scheduled. Yeah. Why don't you do it? Which, yeah, everyone's busy and everyone's a little zoomed out.
spk_0
Yeah. Yeah. It's very understandable. But we've had so much fun. We've, I love that we've had such a breadth of theorems from things like the facts of there, 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.
spk_0
And we've really enjoyed talking to mathematicians about all of these things at all of these different levels.
spk_0
Right. 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're presenting it in a seminar or for a class.
spk_0
Right. There's lots of hand waving that our listeners can't see. Yeah. And they don't have a chalkboard that they can write on. Right. Yeah. So I've really enjoyed that.
spk_0
I've, I've loved the repeats of theorems that we've gotten, which people are so afraid to do. And we just love hearing two different two, three, four, more different perspectives on one theorem.
spk_0
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 know, you need to be exposed to math concepts a few times anyway before they really start to stick.
spk_0
That's why teaching is so great because like when you, when you learned it in the class, you probably didn't understand it the way you did when you teach it because you've seen it more and thought about it in more different ways.
spk_0
So, yeah. I love sharing, sharing the repeats and the one that, you know, the unique ones. So, yeah.
spk_0
Been, been great. Yeah. It's been great fun. So I think it's time to sign off after years. All right. Thanks for listening everyone.
spk_0
Thanks for listening. And you forgot your little line you were going to use. Right.
spk_0
About the best theorems. That's right. I think you deserve the right to use it now.
spk_0
No, no, no, it's yours. It's yours. Our favorite theorems were the friends we made along the way. That's correct. That's it. All right. Well, goodbye everyone.
spk_0
Thanks for listening to my favorite theorem hosted by Kevin Knudsen, the devil of math. The music you're hearing is a piece called Fractalia, a percussion quartet performed by four high school students from Gainesville, Florida.
spk_0
They aren't late Crawford, Gus Knudsen, Del Mitchell, and Bouchon Wynn. You can find more information about the mathematicians and theorems featured in this podcast along with other delightful mathematical treats at Kevin's website, kpkudsen.com, and Evelyn's blog, roots of unity on the Scientific American Blog Network.
spk_0
We love to hear from our listeners, so please drop us a line at my favorite theorem at gmail.com or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.
spk_0
Kevin's handle on Twitter is at niviknauzdunk. That's Kevin spelled backwards, followed by Knudsen spelled backwards. And Evelyn's is at Evelyn J. Lamb.
spk_0
The show itself also has a Twitter feed. The handle is nyfavtpm. That's at my favorite theorem. Join us next time to learn another fascinating piece of mathematics.