Hans Woyda Mathematics Competition Round 2

The St Paul’s team entered the second knockout round of the Hans Woyda Competition on Tuesday 6 February with a well-earned sense of confidence; St Paul’s emerged as the top scorers in Knockout Round 1, and while it’s difficult to compare scores directly across matches it certainly couldn’t be argued that SPGS were easy opposition to steal points from. So it was that we made the journey up to Harrow School in high spirits, with Zane Kumar (Fourth), Anango Prabhat (Sixth), Eason Shao (Lower Eighth) and Benjamin Atkinson (Upper Eighth) eager to repeat their excellent performance in the first round and progress to the semi-finals.

However, we hit a snag before even arriving at the school; the bus we were supposed to take up the hill from the tube station couldn’t leave because the wing mirror was broken, leaving us with little choice but to make the final leg of the journey on foot. As we scaled the disturbingly steep inclines, I began to wonder whether or not this was the result of a deliberate sabotage designed to pre-emptively wear out the team, but a few warm-up questions confirmed that they were still ready and raring to go, and once we had crossed the school grounds and settled in for the match, I felt very optimistic about our chances.

Both teams started strong with a successful run of starter questions, and while St Paul’s managed to gain an early lead, some tricky geometry questions gave Harrow the chance to equalise almost immediately. However, a couple of slips in the mental arithmetic round gave us the perfect opportunity to get ahead, with Zane successfully stealing a question to launch us clear of Harrow and afford us a little breathing room. Both sides were equally successful with the fiddly calculations required for the team question, and as such we maintained our lead going into the tea break, pausing for a few minutes while the boys descended on the enormous selection of sandwiches, wraps and patisserie that had been laid out at the back of the classroom.

The calculator questions after the break proved challenging for both sides, but Anango managed to outdo his Harrow counterpart and extend our lead even further. A further mistake on the algebra and calculus section by Harrow was seized upon by Benjamin and for a moment I thought we might be able to enter the race a whopping ten points ahead, but a slip of our own on the very next question brought the lead back down to just seven points; a comfortable margin, but by no means insurmountable. However, any fears of an upset were quickly dispelled when Zane, Anango, Eason and Benjamin all won their first race questions in record time, sailing clear of the opposition and reducing the last four questions to a mere formality. As it happens, Harrow didn’t manage to pick up any points on those questions either, and while a small slip on our part stopped it from being a clean sweep of race questions we still came out with a pretty extraordinary finish. So it was that St Paul’s stormed through to the semi-final, beating Harrow 58 – 37.

Written by Samuel Cullen-Hewitt