Curiosity Weekly This Episode Will Make You Love Math
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Nov 5, 2025 Kyne Santos, known as the Math Queen, is a math communicator and drag performer with a flair for making numbers fun. They explore the joy of math, from its creative overlaps with art and drag to its everyday applications in decisions like weather and traffic. Kyne also discusses the significance of zero and prime numbers in cryptography, the common causes of math anxiety, and how to reshape our relationship with math. Plus, there's intriguing talk about caffeine's role in tackling daunting tasks and the latest findings on microplastics in the brain.
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Caffeine Boosts Task-Specific Persistence
- A 100mg dose of caffeine increased persistence on a visual hidden-picture task by about a third compared to no caffeine.
- Caffeine's effect depended on task structure and stress, suggesting it alters effort–reward calculations in the brain.
How Competitions Sparked A Love For Math
- Kyne Santos recounts discovering math's creative side through high‑school competitions and open problems.
- That shift revealed math as artistic and sparked a passion she now shares publicly.
We Constantly Use Probabilistic Thinking
- Everyday decisions use implicit probability estimates like weather or traffic expectations.
- Explicit mathematical models make those forecasts far more precise than gut rules of thumb.
