Typing Math

It was 2016 when I first started blogging. I had attended a student-run class known as decals in Berkeley and they went through the basics of how to set up your own website. I would write regularly and then eventually when I returned to Singapore, my blogging habit fizzled away.

Sometime in 2020, I had started giving tuition in a mathematics center to give myself more runway in my craft beer company Binjai Brew. I was teaching a class on Probability which I struggled to convey succinctly, and it showed, as my students found it difficult to answer Probability questions. The mathematics syllabus is dated, the probability questions have been reduced to a box-ticking exercise for examiners to convince themselves that the students appreciate probability concepts. For those who are unable to tick the box, it draws them further away from appreciating mathematics and that is a pity.

We were in the middle of a pandemic, students were unmotivated, and yet they were trying to find it in themselves to sit for the O Level Examinations at the end of the year. I had to make it exciting, and it dawned on me to raise the bar and try to tie in Probability to exciting problems. I found myself inevitably deficient in solving a lot of these problems but the process of exploring these questions with my students made the class more exciting and relatable.

This whole experience brought me back to the idea of blogging on interesting probability questions which I come across in life, mostly when I exclaim, “What are the odds!?”. So recently, when I started blogging again, I had to figure out how to add the functionality to render mathematics in HTML. Today, I finally achieved that.