continuation of boy story(not toy story)

Haha felt like laffing out loud when i saw this.. um i shall not state the event but rather continue the exciting story. i saw that the organiser of the event had "accidentaly" dropped the matches into a puddle of water(boy do i feel sorry for you) but refused to let the boy change the matches. How is the boy going to win with those hopeless boxes of matches? stay tuned!

Good bye Mr Tan. Hello Homework!

Argh Mr Tan(for those who do not know, he is my maths teacher who retired today) i am going to miss certain words of yours for better or worse i dont really know but none the less i will miss them.

"dont be a monkey!",

"You shd know what you are doing and not be like a computer program asked to memorize algorythms",

"you MUST write your working in this manner or else no one will understand",

"being good doesnt mean you will be the top scorer",

"even the construction workers work very hard do they earn a lot?",

"not all teachers are clever enough to understant that you know what you are doing show them that you are clever by writing all the steps down"(um really?),

"not all teachers know the double angle formula its not in syllabus dont use it",

"no one knows if 1+1=2 its a definition and that is why we are doing maths now",

"dont write faster than you think you wont know what you are writing."

"what kind of math is this?" "are u using your brain?"

"only if you get 80+ for all the tests can you not do your homework."

Um i may not have said this before but despite never doing well for his tests or not really paying much attention during his lessons i hav learnt a tremondious amount from him and i have also been inspired to be a great teacher like him but i guess he would ask me to forget about being a great teacher like him but to aim at the ideal and then surpass his ability.

I remember i was stuck at a question and he too was stuck at it, he said he would think of a method to solve the question and he gave me an idea which i used to solve the question. I must state the method was not a good method to do the question which actually has a rather simple method but his working inspired me to continue to try to attempt the question and eventually after inducing for a very long time i got a complicated agebraic expression. i was elated to see that the method actually worked.

In another seperate incident, he asked to borrow my notes to make sense of the topic of functional equations so that he could explain to me the topic. Then he took the pain to read through the badly written notes and then proceded to give me advise on how to understand(i could tell that he was actually unable to really comprehend the notes however he had tried his best to).

Mr Tan I will miss you for not only are you the best maths teacher who i have seen and had as one, i have also seen you as the pillar of support that has encouraged the whole class to do extremely well. It is no surprize then that the two top scoring classes both are taught by you.

Mr Tan, i also have to appolgise for bringing down the average of the class several times because i didnt peform well enough. However i know that you have always believed in me despite "punishing" me several times for acts that i feel are not punishabe. I still remember the first teat i took i scored a very low mark because my 6 looked like a zero. or when my 4 looked like a 9.

I shall end this long report by really thanking you for all that you have done for me and also by respecting your efforts to turn us all into great mathematicians by really showing you that i can be what you want us to be.

Interesting story..

The following post may be offensive to some people. Reader discretion is advised.

I shall not quote the exact story but rather an analogy. For those who know what this is about, these are just my comments with no personal attacks. For the rest who don’t know what it is about, just enjoy the story.

A boy wanted to enter a matchstick lighting competition and had spent days and nights studying about the best method to strike a match and he also studied about the different materials that were used to create the matches. All this was done in an attempt to ensure victory. To top it all, it must also be stated that the previous year's winner was his best friend who had a average of 95 lights per 100 attempts. Despite this, the boy refused to go to his best friend for advice.

The boy knew all that he needed to know, he bought a set of different brands of matches and practiced day and night till he was able to strike a match behind his back held between his ring and little finger.

He slept early on the day before the competition but despite that, he was unable to wake up on time for the competition. Upon getting up, he rushed to his cupboard (where he kept his matchboxes) and RANDOMLY picked a few boxes and stuffed them into his pocket. He rushed to the venue and had just made it in the nick of time.

At the venue, he was asked to place 5 of the boxes he was going to use on the judges table he once again RANDOMLY took 5 and discarded the rest into a nearby bin. The sad thing was that he had placed into one of those 5 boxes all the matches that he was unable to light previously.

He now had entered a competition with 5 randomly chosen boxes. Is he still going to win despite the odds against him? It will be one full year before I know for sure...

Here is what a friend of mine told me, "It's not about the matches but about whether he remembers all that he has learnt," when I told him that there was no way he could win.

SMO senior test (2nd round)

Ahhhh... i suck at geometry..
Of the five questions, two were geom and both of which i was unable to solve... argh.. somone pro at geom pls teach me geom..

ok i hav decided to post the questions and maybe at a later date i will post the answers.. my answer for q4 will be a bit messy so someone else please help me refine it..

here are the questions (the phrasing is really bad!!)

1)a and d are numbers such that a, a+d, a+2d are all prime numbers
larger than 3 show that d is a multiple of 6.

2)ABCD is a cyclic quadrilateral, let the bisectors of A and B meet
at E. Draw a line parallel to CD through E. Let the line intersect AD
at L and BC at M show that ML=AL+BM.

3)Two circles are tangent to each other internally at T. Let AB be
tangent to the smaller circle at P where A and B lie on the bigger
circle. Show that AP bisects angle ATB.

4)You are given several congruent equilateral triangles. Can there
exist a convex hexagon with all internal angles equal to 120 deg
which is formed with 19 of the pieces. 20 pieces? note: the smallest
are of the form 6,10,13.

5)(i)determine if 526315789473684210 is "persistant".
where a persistant number is defined as a number that contains all
digits from 0 to 9 when multiplied by any integer.
(ii) are there any "persistant" numbers smaller than the given number?

NJC DSA INTERVIEW

Yippee today was my interview with NJC.. I think i did pretty ok.. um.. but got a i might not get in.. dunno y.

Ok lets see they asked a lot of questions and i guess i answered them pretty well but some i think i might have screwed up.

So first i went into the room and was asked to be seated and then they went about asking the questions. First was the toughest and the most expected and also the one that i had least prepared for. "Why do you want to DSA into NJC?"
me:"I have heard that the maths soceity here in NJC is very good and my seniors encouraged me to apply for DSA into NJC so that i can benefit from the training here."
him:"Ah.. So you applied because of the maths soceity here?"
me:"yes, actually a few of my seniors adviced me about it so i applied."

So now after that was done the posed the next question that totally made me panick.. luckily i had something to tell them(what i used to tell all my friends who dislike mathematics).
him:"Why do you lik mathematics"
me:"hmmm.. well actually its because i believe that mathematics is eternal truth!"
him:"really?"
me:"yeah. actually not only that i also heard that at a higher level every one ends up studying mathematics even those who take English."
him:(most probably sarcastically)"um.. English?? can you explain how.."
me:"Well i am not too sure how but what i heard is that they assign numerical values to nouns and verbs etc. and then look for patterns that might occur when proper and improper sentences are phrased."
him:"ah. ok."

Then they asked me if i had taken the mathematical olympiads this year.
me:"yes"
him:"senior or open?"
me:"both."
him:"And did you qualify for the second round?"
me:"yes for both i did."
him:"ahh ok."

Then they asked me about any setbacks i had had. I shall not elaborate here but those of you who are very close to me probably know what it is.

Next, they asked me to show them my report book and then questioned why my languages and humanities were weak and my sciences strong(um they are not THAT good who would call a A1,A2,B3 good??)
i gave some stupid reason which i cant exactly recall but luckily that was it..

i left out a large part of the interview here because i cant exactly recall.. i also forgot the order in which the other questions were asked.

After that, i went to wait for the others to come(Wei Hong and Son) so that i could tell them about the questions that were asked to mentally prepare them. Later i went to meet Abel and that was it.

New Blog??

Hmm..
I have a new flash blog.. you can visit it here
See you there!! (p.s. the new posts will be updated on both sites.)

Maths Olympiad

hmmi have a really bad memory.. here are the Open Solutions.
complete version
incomplete(aka my) version

SIMO camp

WOW!! SIMO camp was sooo fun who would think that a camp where every one did nothing more than play and maths would also be having the time of their life..

Well instead of recounting what happened, i think i will jus say that if you want to know what a camp of that sort means you can buzz me..

I also have to say that i slept around 4 and woke up around 7 most of the days.. the most unforgetable day was the night that i stayed up to prepare for my maths test the next day and i just couldnt wake up on time.. i overslept and was late for the test by 15 mins.. argh..

ok i shouldnt recount anymore..

The DaVinci Mystery

The picture of last supper after it is superimposed..

I was stunned by the meaning of this and how this can be realted to real life.. wow christians better be scared for this little mystery might just be proven to be a real thing.. DaVinci you are cool!

Funny guy lame too

Argh.. SMO nightmare

SMO(singapore mathematical olympiad) does seem like a nightmare to most people because most just dont know the methods or suffer a serious mindblock during the test.

I hate it because i fall into neither catagory.. i was doing the paper and i felt pretty confident that my answers were correct because i had resorted to primative counting methods most of the time rather than what i had learnt.

let me just state 1 example of where i screwed up. everyone knows that for all real numbers, x squared is greater than 0 and thus -3/x^2 is less than zero. but i forgot this basic fact. cry...

I solved 22/35 questions last year in the Senior section and that was really around how many i could solve but however this year i could have solved 28 with ease yet i screwed up 10 of them most because of carelessness.. so i ended up with only 18. i thought cos 300 was -ve.. argh..

In the Open i did better than last year(7/25) i got 10/25 right but i could have done much better infact i couldnt solve the simple equation 1298^2+1829^2=5a^2.

and i also did not manage to do simple things i had learnt before. Anyway i have something to be happy about.. i was still the best amongst the people i checked with in the Open catagory in our school.

Although i believe the paper became easier this year they became more technical and require more thinking.. they also involve a lot of arithimatics and that is what i never really practiced.. I should have listened to my father scolding me to memorise my timetables.

argh.. i am sad.. i wish everyone in singapore is having a bad day like me.. argh.. hate this feeling.. no wait i cant let others suffer.. i change my wish.. i wish noone should be having a bad day like me.. i know Son is sad, Daniel is sad, Anson is sad, I am sad... and probably Wei Hao too because he didnot manage to get us to perform to our real potential.

i have started to writeup the questions and will be posting them here once i am done.. i am however unsure that if i do then will i be breaking any copyright laws??

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