Dozens of local residents now have a new appreciation for mathematics, thanks to Toronto-based drag queen Kyne.
The former Canada’s Drag Race contestant and current TikTok influencer was at the John Elliot Theatre on Saturday (July 19) as part of Math in Drag, the Halton Hills Public Library’s (HHPL) program to help kids fall in love with sums.
If there was one theme to Kyne’s chat, it was that math is not just a rigid and by-the-numbers discipline. Creativity can absolutely be part of it.
“People love to tell me how bad they are at math and how it just pains them to try to calculate a 10 per cent tip. But I wanted to show people that fun, creative side of math that I love,” Kyne told the audience.
To that end, Kyne — whose birth name is Kyne Santos — introduced attendees to the Königsberg bridge problem. In short, it’s a riddle that asks people to chart a route through the city of Königsberg without crossing its seven bridges more than once. There is no solution to the riddle, but it instead helps participants understand relationships between points (called nodes) and connections (called vertices), which can be thought of similarly to roads and intersections in a city. This discipline and way of thinking is called graph theory, which is commonly used by computer scientists.
“What I found so artistic and creative about that math is that you could sit there all day trying to go through every solution, or with just one argument using these… you can rule out all possible solutions,” she summed up.
Kyne’s visit was one of several pride-related festivities the library held over the weekend, including rainbow storytime and crafts, and makeup lessons with a drag queen.
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