Final Group Stage Match of this Year’s Hans Woyda Competition

The final group stage match of this year’s Hans Woyda competition took place last Wednesday evening against The London Oratory School.

With Southbank International having pulled out of the running and both of us winning our respective matches against Godolphin and Latymer we were guaranteed first or second place in the group, but this match would decide who would go through to the main knockout competition and who would have to settle for a place in one of the plate competitions instead. Memories of our shock defeat to Latymer Upper last year reverberated around my head as I arranged the classroom into battle formation, and I knew it would be foolish for us to let our guard down – we were already on the back foot with Benjamin Atkinson getting called away at the last minute for an Oxford interview (which, after some deliberation, was deemed an acceptable excuse for missing the match). However, Neil Prabhu stepped in at short notice to join Eason Shao (Lower Eighth), Avinash Ehathasan (Sixth Form) and Zane Kumar (Fourth Form), in whose collective safe hands I happily placed my trust.

St Paul’s got off to a strong start, getting a near-clean sweep on the starter questions and building up an early 8-point lead over The London Oratory. This trend continued with the geometry section, where Eason and Neil were the only ones to pick up any points on a challenging set of questions about shortest distances; indeed, they were so tricky that even the question setters got one of the answers wrong and we had to verify the correct answer during the match! The mental arithmetic and probability section proved to be equally challenging, with a perplexing set of questions on probability escaping most of the competitors. Here too there was more controversy, firstly when I mistakenly handed Zane a printed copy of the wrong question, and secondly when yet another wrong answer turned up in the official solutions. However, things were a lot more straightforward for the team question and both teams happily started compiling a list of numbers which are multiples of their own digit sums, although SPS ended up conceding the bonus point to The London Oratory by running out of time before they could copy all of their answers on to the official answer sheet.

After a short break for sandwiches and crisps, we dived back into the calculator section, where both teams were equally successful on a fiddly set of unit conversion questions. This was followed by another entertaining set of questions in the algebra and calculus section concerning the fractional part of, many of which would have seemed right at home sitting alongside the interview questions pupils have been facing over the last couple of weeks! Finally, we came to the race section, and while technically our lead was still surmountable at this point The London Oratory needed to get every question in order to win. A shiver of fear crept across my neck when we gave an incorrect answer to the very first question, but an off-by-one error meant that they forfeited those points as well and as such no longer had enough questions left to recover, particularly after we picked up another 10 points on the next 6 questions. The London Oratory managed to get the final question of the match to lose in honour, but by the end of the evening, we had secured our place in the main competition with a comprehensive 48 – 25 victory.

I look forward to the difficult task of whittling this impressive squad down to a knockout team in the new year and keeping you all informed of what is sure to be an exciting journey towards the main trophy.

Written by:

Samuel Cullen-Hewitt, Teacher of Mathematics