Hans Woyda Competition – Knockout Round 1 vs City of London School

A report by Mr Cullen-Hewitt on the latest round of the Hans Woyda Mathematics Competition

I started the new year faced with the daunting task of whittling the squad of twelve down to an elite final four for the knockout stages. After a gruelling selection process it was still almost impossible to pick between them, but eventually Gabriel Treneman (Upper Eighth), Haolin Zhao (Lower Eighth), Aidan Wong (Sixth Form) and Michael Sydorenko (Fourth Form) emerged as the best of the best.

The plate competition kicked off last Tuesday, 24 January with our first match away against City of London. While the journey there felt long (helped in no small part by the delights of the District Line), having the Cathedral watching over us as we arrived made it seem a little closer to home. Once we were let past the automatic barriers at the school gates and both teams had settled into their seats, the match got underway, with everyone acutely aware that for one school this would spell the end of the competition.

Both sides started strong, although our team’s encyclopaedic knowledge of prime factors gave us a slight edge in the starter questions and allowed us to create a narrow lead. Some deftly-handled nested circles allowed us to stretch that lead a little further in the geometry section, and I could already feel myself relaxing as we went into the mental arithmetic and probability section. What followed is perhaps the lowest scoring set of questions I have ever witnessed in a Hans Woyda match, with a barrage of probability calculations that would have been challenging even without the 60 second time limit and ban on written working. City of London managed a whopping 3 points against our measly 1, meaning they clawed back some ground and I had to shake off my growing complacency.

Fortunately, this turned out to be a momentary blip. The team question involved searching for binary palindromes and was in contrast an extremely high scoring round for both teams, and our mastery of the calculator section created even more distance going into the final stages of the match. An almost flawless algebra and calculus section gave us an 11-point lead at the start of the race, and while City of London managed to make up some ground in the last eight questions, it wasn’t enough to stop St Paul’s claiming their well-earned victory with a final score of 51 – 42.

Look forward to the semi-final match report against Royal Grammar School, which is coming soon. Below is an example of one of the fiendish probability questions.

8) Two fair dodecahedral dice numbered 1 to 12 are rolled.
Find the probability that the probability of the two numbers shown is a square number.