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A QE team which designed a helmet aimed at saving construction workers’ hearing from damage were among the national engineering prize-winners at The Big Bang – the UK Young Scientists & Engineers Fair.

After progressing through the first day, the four-strong Year 13 team were named as one of the Big Bang Competition Senior Engineering Runners-Up, placing them among the top five teams at the major event held at Birmingham’s NEC.

They had reached the national finals after previously impressing judges with their Sonus-mico Helmet, which warns construction workers when workplace noise exceeds safe levels. The helmet was developed last year under the Engineering Education Scheme (EES) by Yazid Sukhia, Tochi Onoura, Christopher Suen and Sachin Ghelani.

Fresh from their success in Birmingham, Tochi was congratulated in an interview by Vanessa Feltz on BBC Radio London. He explained to her that the team was sponsored by construction company Lovell and that they had come up with the idea after visiting one of Lovell’s sites. During the visit, they had been told about the problems caused by excessive noise.

Sound levels above 85db over a prolonged period can cause permanent hearing damage, Tochi explained. “What is often the problem is that people don’t know how loud that actually sounds – it’s really hard to tell.”

They designed the circuitry and casing to fit inside a normal construction helmet, choosing that to house the device because it is mandatory for everyone on a construction site, including visitors, to wear one.

During the autumn, Tochi’s team were among those invited to show off their design to politicians, policy-makers and industry representatives at a special event at the House of Commons billed as the Big Bang @ Parliament.

• The School has two Year 12 teams in this year’s Engineering Education Scheme, one is again supported by Lovell, the other by office fit-out and refurbishment specialists, Overbury.

It is with regret that the Association announces the death of Adrian Turner (1933-41) on 29 April 2017.

The funeral will be held on 17 May 2017 at 10:45am at Parndon Wood Crematorium.

Sixth-former Milan Hirji has won first prize in a prestigious Science writing competition looking at the challenges found at the very frontiers of Physics.

Milan’s essay won him the top prize in one of the four categories in the Royal College of Science Union’s (RSCU) Science Challenge 2017.

Congratulating him, Chemistry teacher Susanna Butterworth explained that she had publicised the competition in School earlier this year, but it was Milan who had taken the initiative to follow it up and enter. His success had been both “encouraging and inspirational”, she added.

Founded in 1881, the RSCU is a student union and Science outreach organisation at Imperial College London. Its competition, which is in its 10th anniversary year, aims to stimulate thought among future generations of scientists by examining the problems facing society and how Science can be used to tackle them. It also seeks to improve the effective communication of Science to the wider public.

Milan’s winning entry answered the following question: "High-energy physics probes the smallest structures in nature, often using accelerators to get subatomic resolution. In the future, will we run out of resolution? What technologies might help us do better? And why should we even try?"

Dr Butterworth added: “In his answer, Milan demonstrated the rare combination of a thorough understanding of abstract concepts in Physics and the ability to explain them in a clear and accessible way.”

At the prize-giving ceremony, a black-tie event held at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Milan, of Year 12, had the opportunity to meet scientists, Science communicators and Imperial College Physics students. Milan himself plans to read either Natural Science or Physics at university.

Having made his mark as a Mathematics teacher by leading his pupils to national competition successes, Daniel Griller has now written a book of puzzles that is rapidly gaining rave reviews.

Daniel (OE 2001–2008) says Mathematics is not only his job, it is his biggest hobby, too. “I spend a significant portion of my free time either searching for, tackling or attempting to invent interesting maths problems.”

He devised the puzzles in the book, Elastic Numbers: 108 Puzzles for the Serious Problem Solver, for a competition for his own pupils at Hampton School, the independent boys’ day school. Consequently, the book, which was published in March 2017, is accessible to young secondary school pupils. As the cover puts it, it features puzzles that range in difficulty from the ‘fairly straightforward’ through to those designed to ‘push you to the very edge of your abilities’. At time of writing, the book had attracted 16 customer reviews on Amazon, with all of them giving it the maximum five stars.

Daniel’s love of Mathematics is longstanding. His fondest memories of QE revolve around “Mr Dalton's inspiring Sixth Form maths lessons in our class of just six further mathematicians. I had other good teachers at QE, but he stands out as the best of them all. I was motivated to study mathematics at university in part down to his influence.”

Although he recalls a slight blip early in his School career (receiving a detention just two weeks into Year 7 for not writing the date in his homework diary), other memories of QE are uniformly positive, including:

• Winning subject prizes every year, including English, Mathematics and Science in Year 7;
• Scoring a try for the rugby F team in Year 8 or 9 at Oundle or Stowe (“I can’t remember which school – It was a long time ago!”);
• Participating in several matches in the well-regarded Hans Woyda Mathematics competition, which involves 64 leading schools in the London area. “This included being part of a great comeback against Tiffin Girls’ to win the Plate in 2004 as a Year 9 pupil”;
• Taking part in various House Instrumental Competitions for Underne House and winning the Intermediate Competition as a Lower Sixth pupil on the piano.

“Many of my best friends today are friends I made at QE, for which I am very grateful,” he adds.

After QE, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics and was awarded the title of Senior Scholar.
Since then, he has been teaching Mathematics at Hampton, with a particular focus on preparing boys for competitions and for Oxbridge entrance. “I have had a wonderful time at Hampton. I have the privilege of working with some of the brightest young minds in the country, and it is difficult to imagine another job I would enjoy so much, day in day out.”

In his five years there, he has coached teams to two successive national titles at the UK Mathematics Trust’s Senior Team Maths Challenge, in 2014 and 2015. The following year, for the first time in Hampton School’s history, his team won the Hans Woyda competition and has recently taken the runners-up trophy in 2017.

“In 2015, I created the Hampton Mathematics Competition, with the third edition completed just a few months ago. It is a three-stage event; all 1st-3rd year pupils (Years 7-9) take part at the beginning, but then the numbers are gradually whittled down as the rounds progress. I compose all the problems for this competition myself, and it is these problems that appear in my new book.”

He also writes problems for various external competitions: “My inventions have appeared in the British Maths Olympiad, the Intermediate Maths Olympiad and the Senior Maths Challenge,” he said. Besides achieving success with the book, his biggest ambition is to write a problem that appears in an international Mathematics competition.

Outside of Mathematics, Daniel continues to play the piano and also enjoys table tennis, badminton, golf and poker (he played in the World Series of Poker in 2014), as well as reading and cooking. “In addition, I like playing board games, with Codenames a particular favourite at the moment (highly recommended!)”

“I am fortunate to have a great family with interests similar to mine. My mother studied Maths and Computer Science, my father Computer Science, and my younger sister Mathematics. She is now working in the City as an actuary.”

• Daniel has a blog at puzzlecritic.wordpress.com, on which he discusses some of his favourite problems from around the world, and he is @puzzlecritic on twitter. His book, Elastic Numbers: 108 Puzzles for the Serious Problem Solver, is available in paperback from Amazon.

QE boys have performed strongly in an online national Mathematics competition, with two teams winning prizes – one for being the first team in the country to solve two of the puzzles.

The high-speed solutions to puzzles 3 and 5 in the MathsBombe competition came from Sixth-Form team Root to Success. The team, comprising Year 13 pupils Brian Kong, Zayaan Ahmad, Yuta Tsuchiya and Nitharsan Sathiyalingam, all plan to read Mathematics at university. Zayaan said he had particularly enjoyed the “intricate” nature of the puzzles.

Year 12 team Pablo Problems won a spot prize for puzzle 8. (The spot prizes were awarded at random and were open to all teams that had solved a problem correctly.) The team members were Abhishek Balkrishna, Shiran Gnanaraj, Oliver Robinson and Vigneswaran Thelaxshan.

MathsBombe, which is run by Manchester University, started on 18th January this year; a new pair of puzzles was then released every two weeks. The MathsBombe website states that these puzzles “span the whole spectrum of mathematics: from fiendish logic puzzles in pure mathematics to applications of mathematics in real-world settings”.

Teams were ranked firstly in order of the number of puzzles they had solved and then by the total number of points scored for each correctly solved puzzle. Points were based on the teams’ speed of response, with the maximum number of 15 awarded to teams submitting the correct solution within one hour of the first team to solve the puzzle.

Just 47 teams out of the 2,962 teams entering nationally solved all eight puzzles. The 47 included five from QE: Pablo Problems, We Da Bomb, Test Maths Team V2, Pie R squared and 1 Elite Maths. Although Root to Success appeared to be on track for a high position after the four boys achieved the maximum 15 points in all of the first six puzzles, they then slipped down the rankings because they were unable to solve the final two puzzles. The final overall results have yet to be announced.

Congratulating the successful teams, QE’s Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung said: “All the boys have worked entirely independently. The competition was a great chance for the members of Root to Success to test their problem-solving skills ahead of university.”

The competition is supported by the Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Trust, named after a mathematician and astronomer who also served as Lord Mayor of Manchester.

• This is puzzle 3, which Root to Success solved in double-quick time:
  
  A miserly billionaire stores UK coins in a giant silo to avoid paying tax. Coins are released by turning a giant crank attached to the silo, but only one coin is released for each turn of the crank. The billionaire requires 60 coins of identical value. Assuming that the silo contains an infinite supply of coins of every possible denomination in standard circulation (ignoring any special commemorative coins), how many turns of the crank are needed to guarantee this?
  
  And here is the solution provided by the competition organisers:
  
  At first sight, it appears that there is not enough information to answer this problem, but the point is that it doesn't matter what the value of the 60 coins is. Thus, the worst case is actually that we get a different coin for each turn of the handle until we get up to 59 coins for every denomination. The next turn of the crank must then guarantee 60 coins of identical value. There are eight possible denominations: 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1 and £2, which means that the number of turns required is 8 x 59 + 1 = 473.