A team of QE boys has achieved the School’s best-ever result in the national final of the Senior Team Maths Challenge.
The four boys from Year 12 scored 197 points out of a possible 230 and were placed seventh out of 86 teams. Kiran Aberdeen, Bashmy Basheer, Aadi Desai and Niam Vaishnav were invited to the national final after achieving one of the highest second-place scores in the regional rounds in November 2017.
The final of the UK Mathematics Trust competition, which was held at the Royal Horticultural Halls in St James’s Park, London, was won by Ruthin School, an independent school in Denbighshire, who scored 223.
Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung said “The boys performed very creditably against a very high-quality field of opponents.”
The challenge comprises four rounds, which test a wide range of mathematical skills. In the Group round, each team had 40 minutes in which to solve ten questions; they had to decide whether to work individually, in pairs or as a group. The Crossnumber round – crossnumbers are similar to a crossword but with numerical answers – the teams worked in pairs, with one pair taking the across clues and the other the down clues. The exercise required logic and deduction.
In the Shuttle round, the teams had to compete against the clock to answer a series of four questions, with questions 2, 3 and 4 all dependent on the answer from the previous question. In the final relay round, the teams were required to split into pairs, taking it in turns to solve problems – the round involved movement as well as Mathematics.
Kiran, the team captain, said: “It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. My favourite problem was about the number of possible routes between two vertices.”