A QE team came 15th out of 88 national finalists in this year’s Team Maths Challenge, placing them in the top 1% of the many hundreds of schools who originally entered the competition.
The team, drawn from Years 8 and 9, reached the national final at the Royal Horticultural Halls by winning their regional heat in March.
Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung said: “Over 1,700 teams enter the challenge, so to reach the national final is an incredible achievement in itself. As our boys scored a total of 187 points out of 214, it was very clearly a closely fought competition.
“The team were building on an impressive record of achievement in recent years: last year, QE placed 11th and in 2017 we took 17th place.”
Captain Ansh Jassra, of Year 9, and his team of Maxwell Johnson (Year 8), Arnie Sahi (Year 9) and Nishant Sahoo (Year 8) competed against some of the country’s most famous schools, such as Eton College, who came second behind the winners, Bancroft’s School, from Essex.
Ansh said: “It was a really fun day out with lots of challenge. We loved working as a team and it was a memorable experience.”
The event, which was run by the UK Mathematics Trust, consisted of five rounds.
The poster round had a theme of Straight Edge and Compass Constructions, which allowed the pupils to investigate high-level geometry such as Euclid’s postulates, constructing regular polygons (and determining which ones can be constructed).
The activity rounds were:
- Group circus, which involved working on practical Mathematics problems
- Relay race, demanding a combination of physical speed across the room and mental speed in solving mathematical problems
- Crossnumber, the mathematical equivalent of a crossword
- Shuttle, which was a series of mini relays against the clock.