Hans Woyda Friendly SPS & SPGS

Tuesday (17th September) saw the official launching of the 2024-25 Hans Woyda season with our third annual friendly with SPGS. The SPGS team arrived to join the 12 SPS pupils who had made it through the selection process, and after a quick bout of randomised team drafts the pupils settled into their chairs for the first match of the year. The teams were named Alpha, Delta, Gamma and Zeta.

The starter questions proved challenging for all of the teams, with only Alpha and Delta managing to get more than half of them right. Geometry was a very different story with success very nearly across the board, although this round turned out to be Gamma's Achilles heel and put them at a disadvantage for the rest of the competition. For the next section the hall was split into two sides, with teams taking it in turns to hand in their answers first and their opposite numbers only getting a shot at the marks if those answers were wrong. Fortunately there was some strong mental arithmetic on display so opportunities for stolen marks were few and far between. Alpha were starting to pull ahead at this point, but when Zeta successfully found all 21 abundant numbers less than 100 in the Team question compared to Alpha's 16 as they managed to narrow the gap as we reached the halfway point.

After a break for marking (and to appreciate the delicious array of refreshments) the teams settled back into their seats for the calculator questions. Success with these varied from team to team, but only Beta had a clean sweep and demonstrated true mastery of the sigma function! A rather pleasing square root identity was the focus of the algebra section, and here Alpha managed to steal a couple of extra points from Beta to strengthen their position going into the race. They now had a four question lead, but with eight questions to go and a winner takes all approach to the final section it was still all to play for. The room fell silent as each question appeared one by one on the Colet Hall screens, and while there were valiant efforts from Delta and Zeta in particular to catch up to the front-runners, Alpha emerged on top, winning both the race and the overall competition.

- Mr Cullen Hewitt

The Hans Woyda Trials

The Hans Woyda Maths competition is a London based interschool challenge. A big difference to other competitions is that it is a vertical year group team containing a Fourth, Sixth, Lower and Upper Eighth student (Years 9, 11, 12 & 13). The Hans Woyda’s main focus is speed, with seven sections of fast-paced questions. For instance, in the first section students only have 30 seconds to give their answers, and in the last section the first student to answer correctly gets all the points! The trials took place over multiple mornings and lunch breaks and students had to complete a time pressured test in order to claim a place in the St Paul’s squad. The top 3 students of each year group will each compete in one of the group matches of the Hans Woyda competition and will challenge other schools for the illustrious trophy. Here is a selection of some of the questions:

Problem Solving with Mykhailo

The maths society had the pleasure of welcoming one of our own, Mykhailo who presented a captivating talk on problem solving in mathematics. He began by telling us of his journey through mathematics, starting in Ukraine at the humble age of 7, where he agreed to compete in his first Olympiad in return for some Lego - a worthy reward. By the age of 11, however, he began to lose interest, until a remarkable geometry teacher reignited his passion. From that point on he was completely hooked on geometry, so much so that his Olympiad scores reflected his singular focus: 0/7, 0/7, 0/7, and finally, 7/7, as he excelled in geometry alone. He therefore decided that it would be best for his progress if he stopped doing geometry all together, focusing instead on the other 3 areas of math: Algebra, Arithmetic, and Number theory. He led us through a series of questions, seemingly impossible at the face of it, however, very manageable after explanation. Among the problems were a complex simult...

Preparation for the Senior Maths Challenge

With the Senior Maths Challenge (SMC) a week away, 8 th form students are preparing at the Senior Problem-Solving Club. The Senior Problem-Solving club is a lunch time activity where students work through a mix of interesting and stretching questions. The focus this week was on the hard final question on the paper with Dr Hemery and Mr Morris providing the last 20 years of question 25. Here is an example: As the final and typically the most demanding question of the SMC, it provided an excellent test for even some of SPS’s best problem solvers.

SPS Mathematics Blog