Hans Woyda Mathematics Competition – pre-tournament friendly with St Paul’s Girls’ School

A report by Mr Cullen-Hewitt

On 29 September, we kicked off the 2022-23 Hans Woyda Mathematics Competition in rather unusual style with what I’m going to boldly claim to be a world first – a friendly pre-tournament fixture with St Paul’s Girls’ School (SPGS) wherein we converted this head-to-head sport into a six-team battle royale.

The twelve pupils representing St Paul’s (SPS) gathered in the Colet Hall after period eight to ready themselves for the match ahead and await their counterparts from SPGS. It was interesting to observe the variety of warm-up techniques on display – while the Lower Eighths busied themselves in one corner of the room, determinedly trying to construct a regular pentagon using only a straightedge and compass, the Fourths had taken to constructing paper airplanes and competing to see whose could fly the furthest. While the tension was palpable, we didn’t have to wait long for the twelve SPGS pupils to arrive from across the river and, after a rather convoluted randomisation process, the teams were assigned, with two SPS and two SPGS pupils per team.

The teams eased into the competition through some successful starter questions, and we had our first go at inter-school collaboration with the geometry section. The scores stayed fairly even up to the team question, at which point it was fantastic to see such spirited discussion going on in each of the six teams, although sadly one team got carried away and managed to almost completely negate their impressive collection of correct solutions with an equally impressive pile of wrong ones. After the calculator round, some teams started to lag behind, but as we rounded off the algebra section it was still all to play for in the most exciting part of the competition – the race. We split the six teams into three pairs to compete one-on-one with each other, heightening the tension even further as we had to wait for every pair to produce an answer before they could be checked.

In the end, it was an extraordinarily close match, with only five questions between the top and bottom scorers and only one question between the top two. Teams 2, 4 and 6 all came joint fourth (arousing suspicion of some anti-even bias from the judges), with Team 3 just beating them to the podium by a question and a half. However, there could be only one winner, and Team 1 edged their way to victory over Team 5 in only the last three questions of the day.

It is no exaggeration to say that every single pupil in every team was very impressive, and it is clear that both schools have a strong pool of pupils heading in to the official Hans Woyda competition later this term, something which should make our actual group round match against SPGS in a week and a half particularly entertaining! All pupils involved deserve congratulations, but Gabriel and Haran in particular for making up half of the winning team.

Following the success of the friendly tournament, it has been agreed that it will become an annual event.

Look out for the next match report from our official clash on Tuesday 11 October.

SPS Hans Woyda Squad

Fourth Form

Shyamak, Richard, Akshay (standing in for Michael)

Sixth Form

Lachlan, Aidan, Haran

Lower Eighth Form

Haolin, Neil, Yuvraj

Upper Eighth Form

Jash, Gabriel, Adsayan (standing in for George)