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Hans Woyda Friendly SPS & SPGS 2025/26

We kicked off the 2025-26 Hans Woyda season with our fourth annual friendly with SPGS. A quick parity check showed that the girls’ school were responsible for hosting this year, and as such all I had to worry about was ferrying the 12 members of the SPS squad across the river to deposit them safely in Alexandra Shamloll’s capable hands. Once again, she immediately showed me up by having the audacity to further improve the selection of team names. Teams Alpha to Zeta had been replaced by Team Conway, Euclid, Euler, Gödel, Nash and Ramanujan, all of which were chosen by the senior SPGS pupils ready for our arrival. As ever, we competed with mixed teams, with the 4th and U8th pupils from one school joining the 6th and L8th pupils of the other, and once all of the SPS boys had found their allocated mathematician we were ready to begin.

All six teams fared well on the starter questions, but Gödel took an early lead after only making one mistake, while Euler and Euclid fell slightly behind the others. Both Gödel and Conway followed this up with a clean sweep on the geometry section, which relied on a fluent knowledge of circle theorems and triangle geometry, but both fell behind on the mental arithmetic and probability section, with Euclid and Nash in particular starting to close the gap with clean sweeps of their own. Up next was the team question, and given that this concerned finding Mrs Euclid’s PIN number you would be forgiven for thinking that Euclid had an advantage, but in fact Euclid, Euler and Gödel all made the same fatal error in reading the question, mistakenly thinking that the given pattern could be followed in either direction and managing to find just enough incorrect solutions to completely cancel out all of their correct ones! That split the teams perfectly down the middle, with half of them getting 5 marks and the other half getting 0.

The teams took a break while we marked their solutions to the previous question, taking advantage of the delicious chocolate cake provided for us by the catering department at SPGS, and as they settled back down for the calculator section there was still only 13 marks between first and last place, with only 4 marks separating the top four teams; as such, it was very much all to play for. The questions were taken from a 2012 round, and as a result the calculator section was themed entirely around the Olympics. This unexpected dash of athletics in the middle of a mathematics competition may have rattled some of the teams, because two thirds of them only managed to get one right answer, with Nash being the sole team to get more than half correct; whether he would win a 100m race against the other five mathematicians is difficult to determine, but based on this evidence I’d have to rate his chances! Up next was a relatively gentle set of algebra and calculus questions which were based around polynomial expressions in various contexts, with most teams only dropping a single question. That brought us to the race, where only one team would be able to get the marks for any given question. Euclid and Euler had fallen behind the others at this stage, but they both stormed the race, getting five of the remaining eight questions between them, leaving the dregs for Ramanujan and Conway (and a single question that bested all six teams!). Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to catch up, and while the scores were remarkably consistent between the teams, with only an 11 point margin between the top and bottom, Nash emerged as the winner with 59 points (despite not getting a single point from the race). It may not be our Nash, but I took it as a good omen for our Hans Woyda season nevertheless!

The full list of SPS pupils involved is at the bottom of this email, but particular congratulations go to Vyom and Haoming for making up half of the winning team. Vyom deserves extra thanks for stepping in at the last minute to replace Adavya, who had a conflicting commitment, and while he isn’t officially in the squad for this year his performance in the friendly shows that he would be an excellent substitute if needs be!

I look forward to stealing Alexandra’s naming convention once again when I host next year’s friendly, and in the meantime I am excitedly awaiting the first official match of the competition when Aryan, Rafael , Zicheng and Aman will face off against Emanuel School.

2025-26 Hans Woyda Squad

 4th Form (Year 9) - Haoming, Ryan & Aryan

6th Form (Year 11) - Rafael, Ethan & Misha

L8th Form (Year 12) - Andrew, Zicheng & Junhao

U8th Form (Year 13) - Adavya, Aman & William

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