“I can’t take credit for the name,” he said. “Once upon a time, years before I started doing it, one of my students said to me, ‘Hey Sir, wouldn’t it be funny if you started putting videos on the internet and called it WooTube?’ And we all thought, ‘That’s hilarious!’ Then when I started doing it, the name stuck.

“There are 544,000 followers as of this morning. It’s just insane — can you even picture half a million people? I get stopped in the street every now and then, or in an airport. Through YouTube, the general people viewing are teenagers, and last year I was the presenter on this show for ABC Kids, Teenage Boss, about financial literacy, and the target age group is 10 to 13. So even kids in primary school are coming up to me and saying ‘Hi’, even though they don’t know anything about my YouTube channel. It’s kind of bizarre.”

Woo, a maths teacher for over 10 years, began making online tutorials after one of his students was diagnosed with cancer. He wanted the child to be able to access lessons from home. “The standard procedure, when a student is going to be absent for a long time, is to say, ‘Here is the work we’ll be doing, I’ll copy the worksheets for you’,’” Woo said. “But, because I had gone through school myself not immediately understanding mathematics, and really needing someone to help me understand, I thought, ‘You know what? I have this phone in my pocket and it can take video. Wouldn’t it be instantly better to be able to give this student this sort of a step-by-step explanation, like I would in person?’

“I didn’t think it would go anywhere, that’s why some of those earlier videos are so awful. I didn’t think there was going to be any audience — I just wanted it to be ready for him.”

To think that Woo, who is himself a father-of-three school-age children, once struggled with maths, is rather a tricky notion to grasp. “My entire experience going all the way through school was just … well, I was that kid who just never got great marks,” he said. “A lot of my friends, when they found out I wanted to be a maths teacher, were like, ‘Really, Eddie, you of all people?’ I can tell you though, that I always had a curiosity about mathematics.”

Woo, 33, was born in Australia to Malaysian parents, who were both of Chinese origin. School days were, by his own admission, difficult in a social context. “I fell pretty easily into that trope of ‘bookish nerd’,” he said. “I was quite a lonely kid — in my younger years I didn’t make many friends. I looked and sounded different. I have always been a very heavily-introverted person, so making conversation is something I always found difficult, especially with strangers, so everything was stacked against me, really.”

Woo’s parents’ insistence that their three children fully assimilate themselves in to Australian life, helped break barriers. At home, the family spoke only English, and as a result, Woo speaks only rudimentary Chinese. (“In Malaysia, if I don’t open my mouth, people can’t tell. But as soon as I start speaking, they are like, ‘oh, foreigner’.”)

“They really wanted us to really fit in and language was a big thing for them in feeling like people who didn’t belong. They didn’t want us to have that same disadvantage,” Woo said.

While there was no doubt his parents would have preferred him to become a doctor or lawyer, Woo credits them with allowing him to proceed as a teacher, despite their displeasure.

“Looking back now, I recognise how very deliberate they were about taking on the Australian values of letting people make their own mistakes. It’s a typically Eastern thing to really emphasise community and the collective will, and what you should do. Whereas the Western thing is to recognise the value of an individual and what they want to do.

“My sister, before she became a dentist, studied horticulture for a year, which I think was even more horrifying for them than me going into education. They were like, ‘What are you gonna do with that?’ My sister eventually changed her own mind, but I credit my parents with giving us the freedom of choice.”

Speaking to Woo, who lives in Baulkham Hills with wife Michelle and their children, you can’t imagine what else he might do — maths is evidently a greater calling. And through it, he has found himself a YouTube star, an author (his book Woo’s Wonderful World of Maths was published by Pan Macmillan in September), a TV host, 2018 Local Hero of the Year, and soon a speaker at Sydney Writer’s Festival, where he will talk all things maths.

“You know, if you’d said, ‘You will become the head of department and lead a mathematics faculty,’ five years ago I would have said, ‘That’s very funny,’” said Woo. “Maths teacher would not be anywhere in my top 10. A published author, a TV host, an Australian of the Year — all of them are things I would have never guessed.

“But I can say with confidence that I’ve really found a purpose in being able to help people. I feel like I am a voice for educators and a voice for learning mathematics in Australia. It’s a mantle I’ve taken on and one that is so important for Australia.”

Eddie Woo will headline Sydney Writer’s Festival at The Concourse Concert Hall, Chatswood, on May 3, at 6.30pm. Tickets cost $20/$15, visit theconcourse.com.au