Viewing archives for

Twelve sixth-formers heard two lectures from mathematicians chosen for their distinction in the subject and their communication skills.

The Year 12 boys heard Dr Jennifer Rogers, from Oxford University, and Dr Katie Steckles, of schools outreach organisation, Think Maths, deliver this year’s London Mathematical Society Popular Lectures at Bush House.

In her talk, entitled Living is a Risky Business, Dr Rogers explained that we are bombarded with statistics every day and that it is therefore important to be able to discern the truth behind a shock headline.

She discussed, for example, the statistics behind the newspaper headlines about bacon sandwiches causing a higher risk of cancer and being equally as bad as smoking. She explained that there is a 1 in 80 lifetime risk of being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer so scaling this up, this is the same as a 5 in 400 risk. A 20% increase would therefore mean that the lifetime risk of getting pancreatic cancer is now 6 in 400.

The headlines only considered statistical significance without quantifying it in any way. For comparison, there is a 4 in 400 chance of being diagnosed with lung cancer if you have never smoked. Smoking more than 25 cigarettes a day increases that to 96 in 400 as you are 24 times more likely to be diagnosed with cancer. Both results (bacon and smoking) are statistically significant but they do not pose the same risk as each other.

Afterwards, one of the QE Year 12 audience, Nico Puthu, said: “I’m really pleased to find out that it’s perfectly safe to eat as much bacon as I want!”

Dr Rogers finished by explaining her dealings with Ryanair. As Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society, she was asked by the TV programme, Watchdog, to investigate the claims by Ryanair passengers that if they did not book seats in advance (and pay for this privilege), then they were always given a middle seat. Four researchers booked four different flights and all were allocated middle seats. She calculated that this would have a probability of 0.2% which suggests that seat allocation is not random. Ryanair, after many denials, finally admitted that their seating algorithm was not random.

QE attendee Sahil Shah said “I enjoyed hearing about her battle with Ryanair,” while Mudit Tuslianey added: “Dr Rogers’ talk linked well to what we have been studying at A-level.”

For her lecture, Dr Steckles spoke on The Greatest Unsolved Puzzles in Maths. One of her demonstrations involved taking a piece of A4 paper and folding it three times, always folding along the longest edge, and then cutting off all four corners of the resulting shape. How many holes will you have made in the A4 paper when it is unfolded? she asked. (Answer: three). This led on to the introduction of the Euler brick which is a cuboid which has integer lengths and integer face diagonals. Some examples are shown in the image here.

Mathematicians are currently searching for the perfect cuboid which is an Euler brick that also has an integer body diagonal, Dr Steckles explained.

QE’s Assistant Head of Mathematics, Wendy Fung, said: “She finished by saying that all the unsolved problems that currently exist will be solved by people who, when they see a puzzle, don’t give up.”

Akshat Sharma and Aadi Desai spoke afterwards of their appreciation of the puzzles she set. Their classmate, Kiran Aberdeen, said: “I found Dr Steckles’ talk very amusing.”

The sixth-formers helping QE’s youngest pupils at the Year 7 Maths Fair were the first generation to have taken part in the competition themselves.

Now in its sixth year, the House challenge features a morning of activities designed to stretch the Year 7 boys’ mathematical abilities. It was inspired by the UK Mathematics Trust’s Team Maths Challenge events.

The winners for 2017-2018 were Broughton House, with 837 points, followed by Pearce with 825 and Stapylton with 805. Broughton were subsequently presented with the trophy, the Scarisbrick Shield, in assembly. The shield is named after former Head of Mathematics, Fauziah (Gee) Scarisbrick MBE.

Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung said: “Each team was supervised by a Year 12 Further Maths student and it was a great opportunity for these sixth-formers to interact with Year 7, whether they were supervising a team or helping with the logistics of running the event: we couldn’t have done it without their help.” She pointed out that the Year 12 boys had themselves been participants in the inaugural Maths Fair, back in 2013.

The boys took part in a carousel of activities – some were more familiar mathematical problem-solving activities (A Question of Maths) and others more practical (Tangrams). Then, all teams took part in the Relay, which combines speed in movement about the room and speed in solving a maths problem.

“The idea is to show boys that mathematical problems come in many different formats as well as to help them to develop team-working skills,” said Miss Fung.

Year 7 Broughton pupil Aradhya Singh spoke of his happiness at his House’s victory, adding: “We hope that Broughton can win it again next year.”

All six Houses were also required to create a poster entitled What is Mathematics? Each of the teams within each House had to create part of the poster and was asked to prepare in advance by coordinating the different sections so that their poster would encompass the many facets of the subject.

The award for best poster went to Staplyton; it was put on display afterwards in the Mathematics department.

Siddarth Sridharth said: “We’re really happy to have won the poster competition and that our efforts paid off,” while fellow Stapylton House member Yash Patel added: “We spent a lot of time discussing how to show Maths in the best possible way.”

Old Elizabethan Robert ‘Judge’ Rinder experienced an emotional journey to the Nazi concentration camp where his grandfather, Morris Malenicky, was imprisoned in this week’s episode of the BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are?

Polish-born Morris lost seven relatives – his parents, four sisters and a brother – in the Treblinka Camp in Poland in 1940 and he was the only one of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust.

In 1942, he had to register the deaths. The certificate, which is shown to Robert (pictured above at his Bar Mitzvah with his grandfather), reads: “Malenicky. Place of birth: Piotrkow, Poland. Circumstances of death: Four sisters, a brother, parents, Treblinka Camp. Gas chambers, crematorium.”

At this point in the programme, Robert (OE 1989–1994) says: “Imagine writing that, how your four sisters, your brother and your parents were wiped out.”

In an interview with the TV Times, Robert explained why he wanted to take part in the programme: “So many of us are interested in understanding where we came from and I only had an outline that I wanted coloured in. But it’s also important that we all understand more about the Holocaust.”

Morris, who was a teenager at the time, escaped the fate of his family only because he was deemed strong enough for work: he was put into forced labour at a glass factory in Piotrkow, his home town. Later, he was sent to the Buchenwald and Schlieben camps in Germany and then to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, which was liberated by the Russian Army three weeks after his arrival.

After the war, he was brought to the UK by a Jewish charity, the Central British Fund. He later met and married Lottie, Robert’s grandmother. Morris died in London in 2001 at the age of 78.

During the programme, Robert is shown the house where Morris grew up in Piortrkow, the ruins of the glass factory, the Buchenwald camp and its sub-camp, Schlieben. At Schlieben, he meets one of his grandfather’s friends, Ben Helfgott, who tells him about the starvation they suffered there,

He told the TV Times: “…there was a biting cold and I imagined my grandfather there in ragged clothing. I met up with my grandfather’s friend, Ben, who had been with him there. The most powerful moment was when Ben said to me, ‘Let’s walk out of here together’. That changed my life.”

Robert is also seen visiting Lake Windermere, where Morris arrived, and watches footage of the orphans’ journey to England. “As I approach Windermere, I imagine what my grandfather would have felt coming from the dankness and greyness of Schlieben into this – big sky, and green, verdant English loveliness.”

Robert said he had spent a great deal of time with his grandfather, yet he had never really told the family what had happened. “…The Holocaust was an unforgettable shadow in the family as my grandfather would behave in eccentric and challenging ways because of what he’d been through.”

Overall, Robert described the experience of making the programme as “an amazing gift. They’d just been statistics before but I read details of how his siblings were good at school and that they loved performing and that breathed life into these young children for me.”

He told the TV Times that his plans for the coming months include more episodes of Judge Rinder and of the Crime Stories programme and, perhaps, a chat show as well.

Queen Elizabeth’s School has been listed as the country’s top boys’ grammar in a new Daily Telegraph league table based on GCSE results and the progress made by pupils since primary school.

The listing of academically selective schools – in which QE was placed third overall – is based on educational data and examination results from 2017.

In her report on the table’s top ten schools, journalist Sophie Inge wrote of QE that it is “consistently placed at or near the very top of the national league tables”, adding that “far from being an ‘exam factory’, it encourages pupils to follow their passions”. She also noted that all sixth-formers are required to carry out voluntary service.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I am very pleased to see the achievements of our boys and their teachers recognised in this table.

“It is sometimes claimed that grammar schools’ apparent academic successes are illusory because they achieve them by merely ‘creaming off’ the brightest children and then relying on their innate ability. For QE, this table gives the lie to that accusation, demonstrating that our boys are successfully stretched and challenged to fulfil their potential.”

The grammar school table combined two measures of pupil performance.

Firstly, it took into account the percentage achieving five or more GCSEs graded A*–C (or 9–4, under the new marking system). All of the top ten schools achieved 100% by this measure.

Secondly, the newspaper looked at the Department for Education’s Progress 8 measure, which records the progress made by children between the end of primary school and their GCSE results. Recently updated to take account of the new-style GCSEs, Progress 8 is often described as a measure of the ‘value added’ by schools.

QE achieved a Progress 8 score of 1.16, placing it narrowly behind The Tiffin Girls’ School in Kingston upon Thames and Upton Court Grammar School, a co-educational school in Slough, and ahead of Nonsuch High School for Girls in Sutton. There were no other north London schools besides QE in the top ten.

Boys in Year 8 pitted their talents against each other in a competitive Dragons’ Den-style challenge, first designing an innovative product and then pitching it at the end of the day.

The event, held as part of the School’s Enrichment Week, aimed to get boys using skills in the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

They had to design a product to solve a real-world problem, while also considering their marketing and business proposition. To create their prototypes, the participants were allocated a budget which they could use to buy the basic materials (such as card, tape and wooden sticks) from a ‘market’ in the hall.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This event encompassed problem-solving and combining knowledge of science, product design, technology, finance and business acumen to come up with a new product that was a practical proposition – and all in the space of a day. The boys successfully produced some very interesting and promising proposals.”

All boys in Year 8 took part in the challenge, which was split across two days. It was led by Simon Kettle, Executive Director of STEMworks, a not-for-profit company dedicated to promoting STEM. Simon also judged the boys’ projects.

Afterwards, Simon said: “The students were given the opportunity to design and develop ideas that use some new, cutting-edge technologies. I talked through a few new materials and the associated technology – and the students did the rest. They came up with a wide range of new product ideas, with the best being presented in the Dragons’ Den.”

The winners’ product on the first day, which they named SOLAcharge, used small portable solar panels to charge a mobile phone. The second-day winners designed Simon’s particular favourite – SafeSensors, a sports helmet which not only protected the head but also had built-in impact sensors that could notify the team coach or doctor of any impact that would require a player to be treated or substituted (in cases of concussion, for example).

Other ideas included mobile phones with in-built smoke alarms, smart baths (that would self-regulate temperature and could not over-fill), and even a helmet capable of styling the wearer’s hair!