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The whole of Year 10 – 180 boys – engaged with the lighter side of Mathematics when award-winning mathematician and comedian Matt Parker gave a special presentation.

The event, looking at the application of Mathematics, was organised by Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung.

“We invite Matt in to encourage the boys to see that there’s more to Maths than just completing exercises from a textbook,” she said. “His lectures help boys recognise that Maths is all around us and useful in many, many ways. As part of this lecture, he explained how all digital displays are spreadsheets: for example, watching TV is looking at a spreadsheet and listening to coordinates!”

This year’s talk was based on The Number Matrix. “There are numbers all around us that make our modern lives possible,” said Mr Parker. “From rescuing your lost words in text messages to protecting your Facebook profile, we rely on numbers to transmit and protect information – not just numbers, but text, pictures and sound – every day. In this highly engaging session, your eyes will be opened to the ubiquitous sea of numbers we all live in.”

Matt is based in the Mathematics department at Queen Mary, University of London, and is a previous winner of the People’s Choice Award at the national FameLab competition. He is a regular speaker for both the Royal Institution and the BBC. He is a highly enthusiastic mathematician who says his life goal is to make people more excited about Mathematics. His favourite number is currently 496!

A musical evening celebrating non-musical events made an unusual first concert of the year at QE.

Entitled The Seven Ages of Man and based on Jaques’ speech of that name in As You Like It, the concert marked the School’s own participation in the 2014 celebrations of the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

To a very full house in the Shearly Hall, Niam Radia, of Year 13, opened the concert by performing the speech, which famously begins with ‘All the world’s a stage’. The concert featured the School’s Symphony Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture, which tells Shakespeare’s ultimate story of impossible love, Romeo and Juliet. The music was also interspersed with a series of dramatic interludes – all passages from the Bard.

The musical items reflected the seven ages, beginning with infancy and a child on the changing table in Peter Warlock’s Pieds en l’Air, as well as Mozart’s and Brahms’ lullabies.

Director of Music Kieron Howe’s programme notes set out how the music then moved through the ages: “For the younger schoolboy we have cartoons in the Pink Panther Theme and a medley of fantastic melodies from the Disney studios. We look a little older for the lovely piece from The Sound of Music, Sixteen Going on Seventeen. We have a view of the stage of man as lover with the Junior Concert Band’s performance of Adam Duritz’s song Accidentally in Love from Shrek 2. The soldier is referenced in Gustav Holst’s Mars from The Planets Suite again performed by the Junior Concert Band.”

In the second half of the concert, old age was reflected in Benjamin Britten’s canonic arrangement of Old Abram Brown. The Tchaikovsky overture finished with the dramatic chords from the full orchestra becoming a final single long note depicting the death of the two lovers.

The concert involved a wide range of ensembles, including the Junior and Senior String Orchestras, the Junior Indian Music Ensemble, the Junior Concert Band and the trebles and altos of the Choir.

It ended with three movements from Requiem, the mass for the dead, which was the piece Mozart was writing at the time of his own death in 1791. Fittingly, this final performance featured the full spread of ages at QE, from Year 7 boys through to this year’s Upper Sixth and the staff choir.

The dramatic interludes ranged from well known soliloquys, such ‘To be or not to be’ from Hamlet, performed by Surya Bowyer, of Year 13,  to excerpts from Titus Andronicus, declaimed by Konstantin Nikolov, of Year 11,  and from Henry VI Part II, performed by Alex Wingrave, also of Year 11.

A QE team has achieved the School’s best-ever performance in the national final of the prestigious UK Maths Trust’s Senior Team Maths Challenge.

Captain Bhavik Mehta, Akash Amalean, Vaheshan Ramaneswaran and Tianlin Zhang, all from Year 12, were the first-ever team from QE to qualify for the national final, which was held at the Camden Centre in King’s Cross. They reached the last round after seeing off 18 other schools to win their regional final, held in November at Merchant Taylors’ School in Northwood.

In the national final, QE was placed 11th from a field of 59 schools. The team scored 167 points out of 182, only ten points behind the winners, Hampton School, who were accompanied by their Mathematics teacher, Old Elizabethan Daniel Griller, a 2008 leaver.

More than 4,000 pupils from 1,100 schools across the UK took part in the competition, which aims to promote mathematical dexterity, team-working, and communication skills.

A Year 11 pupil was named the best speaker at the regional final of a national public-speaking competition. Miles Huglin was awarded a shield for his speech arguing against the view that 'the truth has no inherent value' in the Hertfordshire final of the English-Speaking Union's Public Speaking Competition.

The tournament is open to teams of three pupils in Key Stage 4 (Years 10 and 11). “Miles and his team-mates, Akshat Joshi and Pranesh Varadarajan, also from Year 11, competed against seven other schools,” said History teacher Charlotte Coleman, who oversaw QE’s entry. “The team performed very well, but the standard was exceptionally high, with each of the competing schools having previously won a first-round competition, and unfortunately they did not progress to the next round.”

The Public Speaking Competition for Schools was started in 1960 and has evolved to become a highly respected national competition. Each team member takes one of three roles – chairperson, speaker or questioner.

Students who participate in the competition develop their knowledge of topical issues, while enhancing their speech-writing skills, their speaking and presentation skills, and their ability to think analytically on their feet. One of the aims of the competition is to help to develop confidence in the participants.

QE took second place in the London final of the popular national Real Business Challenge.

The challenge is an annual competition run by Coca-Cola Enterprises Ltd (CCE) as part of its award-winning education programme. This year, it attracted entries from more than 750 schools across Great Britain – a total of around 10,000 contestants.

The Year 10 team of Ananthanarayanan Balaji, Adrian Burbie, Christopher Deane, Premakathyian Premsankar, Luxshan Ragupathurajah, Aditya Ramachandran, Umang Thakrar and Shavhugan Vimalendiran were among just 70 students to reach the London regional final.

“This success reflects the boys’ commitment, hard work and ambition,” said Economics teacher Sonia Strnad. “Personally, I was extremely proud of their success in securing second place in only our first year of competition in this challenge.”

In the London final held at The Oval cricket ground, the ten teams were required to work as a company to develop a campaign to raise awareness for The Street Games – a national charity that aims to bring sport to young people in disadvantaged communities across the UK.

As part of their digital campaign, contestants had to prepare a ‘viral video’ and create an ‘app’.

They also had to prepare a campaign poster, along with a budget summary and a final presentation in which they delivered their ideas for ‘blue sky thinking’ to a panel of judges from CCE and The Street Games.

“The boys delivered the most professional, confident and innovative presentation of their campaign at the regional final,” said Mrs Strnad. “This was confirmed by the organiser, who commented on the fact that in her four years of running this competition she has not seen more original and confident delivery.

“This was a fantastic experience for our boys; they worked efficiently as a team and were able to apply their independent, critical and interpersonal skills to every task of the day.”