SPS Mathematics Blog

House Mathematics started this week and it already looks like a fiercely fought contest. With house points on the line, who can blame them! It is true that Paulines love competition but House Mathematics is certainly one of the highlights of the year. The competition is formed of three rounds, the first round, semi finals and finals. In these, a student from each year group partakes in quickfire questions, similar to those of the Hans Woyda, in a head to head battle with another house. All 8 houses played in the first round:  Langley 32 Stewart 26 Cloete 34 Nilsson 26 Gilks 24 Harrison 22 Blurton 34 Warner 26 These were hosted in individual classrooms. I personal thought what was most impressive, was the crowd of supporters who came to cheer on their houses. In some rooms it was hard to find a place to sit. Well done to all who were involved and a special thanks to the 8 Maths teachers who gave up their time to run the first round of the competition. The Semi Finals are up ne...

This week, Louis gave a fascinating talk to the Maths Society all about fractals; those strange, endlessly repeating patterns that you find in nature. Whether you’re zooming into a fern, a snowflake, or a Sierpiński triangle, the same shapes keep appearing. Louis explained that fractals were originally developed to help describe rough, irregular shapes in nature – things that traditional geometry couldn’t handle. He introduced us to the Hausdorff dimension, a tool used to measure the 'size' of irregular shapes. Unlike traditional dimensions, it exists on a continuous scale. If you apply the Hausdorff measure to a shape for all dimensions lower than its true Hausdorff dimension, the result becomes infinite, a sign of its complexity. He demonstrated this using the triangle fractal. We also looked at the box-counting dimension, a more practical method for measuring how a shape scales as you zoom in. This helped us apply ideas to the Sierpiński triangle and understand how a for...

This Friday at the weekly meeting of MathsSoc, the members participated in a Maths quiz. Different teams competed against each other, tackling questions from an inconspicuous Japanese textbook, as well as IMO preparation papers. Over twenty minutes, teams divided the questions and attempted to conquer. Some rushed straight into the algebra-heavy sections, confident that their speed would pay off, while others carefully picked apart the geometry problems, preferring precision over pace. The atmosphere quickly became one of focused intensity: pages filled with half-finished calculations, muttered debates over which substitution to try next, and the occasional groan when an apparently simple problem turned out to have a hidden twist. Although the competition was light-hearted, there was a real sense of excitement in the room. The questions were unlike those found in the average textbook: they required creativity as much as method, forcing participants to think beyond routine exam prac...