What’s one fact that nobody knows because nobody needs to know, but everybody should know because it’s simply fun to know? Kyle Li (12) knows.

“Armadillos are the only animals besides humans that can get leprosy,” he said, a proud yet playful smile on his face. He might have found this golden nugget of information in a biology textbook, but he doesn’t remember. All he knows is that knowing this gives him a special sense of gratification, often in the form of clout among his peers — not to mention that it recently won him a point in a QuizBowl practice round.

Anybody who is familiar with Kyle knows that his store of knowledge is far more than meets the eye. From spending hours polishing his approach to a Rubik’s Cube, to learning how to make audiobooks for dyslexic and blind readers, to taking a deep dive into the intricacies of image modification, Kyle’s curiosity has led him to explore such a wide range of fields that it seems impossible that they’re all connected.

In fact, they aren’t — not really, at least. For Kyle, the connections between his many different interests don’t matter as much as the interests themselves.

“I don’t really have a unified view of myself,” Kyle said. “I don’t really think about myself too often in terms of character traits. I just do things, you know?”

And for Kyle, it’s just that simple: When he stumbles across an activity or a hobby that piques his curiosity, he doesn’t miss his chance to take the opportunity to develop new passions, if only purely for the pleasure of pursuing curiosity itself.

“Most of my interests don’t have any noble reason or specific objective. I just like doing them,” he said. “There’s no good other reason to do anything … Just do things that you enjoy.”

For instance, Kyle found out about the sport of squash via Google, and after reading a little about it online, he went to try it out. Just like that, Kyle’s now been playing squash for two years, taking private lessons at Bay Club Santa Clara. 

This process — Googling an interest and then just going out to chase it — is a common experience to Kyle, who follows his curiosity wherever it takes him and has led to the discovery of many new, albeit ephemeral, hobbies. Recently, Kyle rediscovered the art of origami after a years-long hiatus, and since then, it has joined the list of hobbies that promote what Kyle terms “productive procrastination.”

“There’s not that much purpose to it. I’ll probably get bored of it and stop doing it next week, and that’s completely fine,” he said.

Many of his pursuits are driven by more than just a desire to procrastinate, as Kyle’s older sister, Adele Li (‘16), describes. Beyond squash and origami, Kyle has also delved into the fields of mythology, strategy games and history, reading up on topics that fascinate him to further his understanding of the world around him.

“Kyle is genuinely a very curious person. He’s curious about all different aspects of life,” Adele said. “He loves knowing facts and knowing trends. I think he’s really in pursuit of knowledge and in pursuit of mental strength and agility.”

Another of Kyle’s interests is gastronomy, which stems from family vacation dinners and baking adventures with Adele. This summer, he took this particular interest to a new level, securing a job as a member of the kitchen staff at Michelin-star restaurant Plumed Horse in downtown Saratoga. Kyle was looking for a summer job and had originally applied for a waiting position at Sushi Heaven when he decided that he, in his words, “might as well apply to Plumed Horse, which is much better.”

Though Plumed Horse hadn’t posted a job listing, Kyle reached out to their HR department, introducing himself and inquiring after a position. He landed a job as a kitchen staffer, working a shift from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and helping to prepare food for the restaurant’s dinner service.

As much as Kyle enjoyed working behind-the-scenes of a gastronomically acclaimed restaurant, he wishes that he could have stayed for dinner service to “do some, like, actual cooking,” he says. Another one of Kyle’s intellectual interests called, however, and Kyle’s evenings were dedicated to a wholly different kind of work: classics research.

Kyle, secretary of the Junior Classical League at the upper school, spent part of his summer at the cross-disciplinary research institution Quantitative Criticism Lab, working on a project that uses computer science tools like words vectors to zero in on innertexts in Latin literature.

As esoteric as it sounds, part of what draws Kyle to the classics is the very obscurity of the language and culture itself, which offers more opportunities of intellectual discovery. Even then, Kyle finds a surprising relevance in studying what some, including Kyle himself, might call a “dead language.”

“The coolest thing about Roman culture and life is how different it is and second of all how it applies to modern life,” he said. “We’re looking for the ‘aha’ moments where you could see connections between like, ‘Wow I didn’t know this specific English word came from this specific Latin word,’ or like ‘This holiday was originally Roman Saturnalia.’”

Almost paradoxically, as much as Kyle seeks to find connections between Latin and modern day society, he doesn’t extend the same effort to his life at large. Rather than reflecting on the long-term picture or mulling over the overall trajectory of his path through high school, Kyle takes life step by step, finding happiness in every moment.

“I don’t really think about the big picture too often — like the future, for example. I just go instinctively to the nearest, most rewarding thing that I can think of,” he said.

This brings us to QuizBowl, which in many ways is the ultimate manifestation of Kyle’s philosophy. As QuizBowl president, Kyle spends much of his time perfecting his buzzing strategy and collecting new bits and pieces of information. The arsenal of knowledge that he has built from years of QuizBowl training have brought him not only respect among his peers but also pure intellectual happiness.

“He truly enjoys just taking in information,” Jeffrey Fung (12), vice president of QuizBowl, said. “He’s always willing to appreciate the amazingness of random facts, and he has this sense of wonder whenever he’s learned something new that’s pretty cool, and I think that’s something you don’t get all the time.”

In fact, because of the sheer intellectual scope that QuizBowl encompasses, it speaks to Kyle’s style of curiosity. Beyond just finding joy in knowing more, Kyle doesn’t know specifically what field he plans on committing to in college, and QuizBowl gives him an opportunity to explore all of them.

“You get to interact with so much more breadth and so many more subjects, like in art, in history and in literature,” he said. “All of those are so present in culture and TV shows and movies that even a broad depth [of knowledge] will let you be much more connected to what you’re doing right in the moment, in your daily life.”

In many ways, QuizBowl and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake embodies the heart of Kyle’s journey, which, though it doesn’t follow a traditionally linear and focused path, is driven by his voracious, boundless intellectual curiosity, which he doesn’t only pursue by himself. Rather, much like he does in QuizBowl, Kyle seeks to share his intellectual passions and “productive procrastination” hobbies with his friends and family — even with those who share totally different interests, like Liam Bakar (12), his friend since freshman year.

While Liam describes their friendship as the embodiment of the saying “opposites attract,” he also describes Kyle as the “trendsetter” of their friend group, pioneering new interests.

“Even though he’s not the most vocal person, we all follow him,” Liam said. “We like to continue doing what he does.”

Much as the diversity of interests shared between Kyle and his friends have forged bonds between them, it seems like the unifying connection between these different manifestations of his curiosity is so elusive because it lies in the very disparateness of his interests. After all, from armadillos to squash to word vectors, the complete mosaic of Kyle’s passions is what makes Kyle, Kyle.