First official Hans Woyda mathematics competition of the season

After the introductory friendly a fortnight ago, St Paul’s School (SPS) and St Paul’s Girls’ School (SPGS) reunited this week for the first official match of the 2022/23 Hans Woyda season. The Hans Woyda Mathematics Competition is run every year between 64 schools across London, organised into 16 Leagues of 4 teams.

Spirits were high as we headed across the river towards the girls’ school, and we took the opportunity to warm up with a few starter questions along the way. Fortunately, the SPS team of Michael, Lachlan, Haolin and Jash had all taken part in the House Maths competition at lunchtime and so were already in the right frame of mind for some more high speed head-to-head mathematics. When we arrived, we were taken to one of the newly-built classrooms for the match, where the eerily effective soundproofing served to heighten the tension in the air, and after a quick refresher on the rules we dived into the starter questions.

The scores at the friendly suggested that this was going to be a close round, and it soon became apparent that the two teams were extremely evenly matched. A small slip in the starter section allowed SPGS to build a narrow two-point lead which they then determinedly held on to through the geometry, mental arithmetic and team questions. Some rusty calculator techniques gave SPGS the opportunity to increase that lead to six points, but a strong performance on the algebra and calculus questions reduced it to just three points going into the race, meaning that two correctly answered questions would be enough for SPS to overtake.

The boys had already flexed their problem solving agility in some of the previous questions, with Haolin in particular psyching out our opponents by aggressively writing down the prime factorisation of 4356 within milliseconds of the questions appearing on the board – that might sound like an exaggeration, but in the context of the competition it was a very dramatic moment! As such, I was quietly confident going into the race that we could bridge the gap and gain the lead. Michael kicked things off with some quick fractions but Lachlan was a fraction too slow parsing a confusingly worded question, which put the two schools back on level pegging. Haolin lived up to his reputation with some blisteringly fast factorials, and Jash followed suit with a general binomial expansion to take us one point ahead of SPGS.

Two more correct answers would put us out of the girls’ school’s reach entirely, but they weren’t giving up so easily, and after a quick exchange of points and some thorny surds that tripped up both year 12s, we were still only one point clear going into the final question of the match. A correct answer from SPGS would give them the victory, and with Jash offering an incorrect solution I felt the win slipping through our fingers. I could barely breathe as I waited for the other answer to be checked, but the final question turned out to have stumped both year 13s, and so it was that SPS ended the match victorious. The final score was 49-48, and it was an extremely impressive performance from both sides.

Congratulations to the team. Look forward to the next match report after remedy when we face off against Godolphin and Latymer at home. See below the final question that bested both year 13s.