Hans Woyda Final
The St Paul's team of Sahl Khan (4), James Aaronson (5), Hugh Emerson (L8) and Guy Emerson (U8) has won the Hans Woyda Mathematics Competition. This is the fifth year in succession that St Paul's has won the competition.
64 schools in the London area enter the competition each year with the top 16 teams going through to the knock-out phase. After knocking out Colfe's School in the quarter-finals and our sister school, St Paul's Girls' School, in the semi-finals, we met Westminster School in the final.
Both teams are set mathematical challenges to be solved against the clock: some are to be answered mentally, others are purely algebraic; there's a team round and an exciting race round where whichever team answers first gets the points. St Paul's took the lead with the first question and produced their best performance all year to win 48 points to 42, having never been behind.
An example of the challenge faced by the team (60 seconds allowed):
Find the largest integer which divides exactly into
(n-2)(n-1)n(n+1)(n+2)
for all positive integers n.