ABSTRACT
You may have some previous experience with probability. If so, please put it aside and approach this chapter with a fresh and open mind.
Because this is a discrete mathematics book, we are going to restrict ourselves to discrete probability. Effectively, we will only consider situations in which there are a finite number of events that may happen. This makes a lot of things easier. In fact, some things are so much easier that they appear to simply be counting problems! However, they aren’t just counting problems. The concepts that lead to these enumerations have much deeper meaning. If you approach such problems as merely computations, you may fall prey to misconceptions. Focus instead on the big ideas and let the computations be the pleasurable end of reducing harder problems to easier problems.
