Habs played in the final of the Hans Woyda Maths Competition.
The Hans Woyda Mathematics Competition runs every year between 64 schools across London, arranged into 16 leagues of 4 teams. Each team consists of a Year 9, Year 11, Year 12 and Year 13 student from each school. The challenge is to complete difficult maths problems under timed conditions.
Habs last won the tournament back in 1991, yet our students were undaunted, beating Whitgift School 49-24 to take the crown.
The match report
The atmosphere in the affectionately named Haringmobile was jovial yet flavoured with a touch of trepidation as Joseph (9R1), Jamie (11J1), Oliver (L6M2) and Sai (U6R1), along with the titular team leader Mr. Haring, made their way to the train station. Unlike our semi-final opponents, St Paul’s, our new opposition of Whitgift School was a bit of an unknown variable, but their score of 56 points in their semi-final made clear that they were hardly a team to be scoffed at. Fortunately, as we moved onto the locomotive part of our journey into central London, head of maths Miss Harrison and maths aficionado Mrs. Brock were on hand to lighten the mood with a huge range of mathematical anecdotes, and a scenic walk from the remarkable Blackfriars station to the neutral venue of City of London School led us to a slightly undersized reception which acted as an antechamber for both us and our opponents.
Once we were seated in the competition room, with an eye-catching set of trophies and book prizes to the side, we were reminded of our mission as the key organisers enumerated the historical winners, with a set of 4 Habs victories in 6 years from 1985 to 1991 being followed by a 33-year gap now waiting to be closed. The starter questions proved to be no great challenge for our well-practised team, and we were able to build an early lead of 14 points to Whitgift’s 10. In the geometry round, Mr Haring’s joy at seeing his geometrical creations realised with some (not to scale) models of paper folding configurations provided to the students was offset by the torment of our team members who were once again thwarted by their ancestral enemy, providing only 1 correct answer out of 4. Nonetheless, strong performances on the Mental Arithmetic and Probability round led us to enter the collaborative team round with a healthy lead of 24 to 16.
A tour de force for the universally-feared Haring double-convergence strategy led to Habs going 55 for 55 on the main part of the round, with a slightly weaker performance on some more stretching questions. The round concerned the unusual function f which maps integers to the number of letters in the English name for that integer – maths fans will know that 4 is the only number n with the property that f(n) = n, and it turns out that repeatedly applying f to any number eventually yields 4 (for more exploration of the properties of f and analyses of other languages, see a good Matt Parker video on YouTube). The question posed in the competition was determining exactly how many iterations of f are required to reach 4 for any given number, with a stretch exercise asking for the largest value of n under 1 million such that k iterations are required to reach 4 for some k. I fear that the complexity of the question, which was exacerbated by a somewhat obtuse mathematical phrasing, was responsible for the misunderstanding by the Year 13 that led Whitgift to a score of 0 on that round, while we picked up 8 – in fact, this completes a streak of team round victories that has kept on through all 7 of our matches this year. This left the competition in an excellent state for us, as we now led by 32 to the opposition’s 16, and it would not be long before our score strayed into untouchable territory.
Next up was the calculator round, where Oliver’s lack of the so-called ‘brick calculator’ led to no solution, as he was forced to convert a quintic to a quartic by hand with a laborious polynomial division – Sai and Jamie, meanwhile, were more successful. It was midway through the subsequent algebra and calculus round that it became clear that our lead was insurmountable, and so we were able to appreciate the questions with a reduced level of stress but an enduring desire to push our score as high as we could. The questions, meanwhile, had other ideas, and we were actually outdone by Whitgift on the race round, despite a correct solution to a lovely question – what is the only three-digit number that divides all numbers of the form abcabc – which seems to be proof that the prime factorisation of 1001 should be top of the learning list for any future Hans Woyda hopefuls. Nonetheless, it was too little, too late – the match was over, the score was an extremely strong 49-24, and Habs, after 33 years, had done it.
The rest was formality – the presentation of the main trophy along with individual small trophies and book prizes; the team photos, including some shamelessly staged pictures of the team ‘at work’; and of course the shaking of hands with the Whitgift students, who, despite the final scoreline, have clearly done very well in the competition to get to this point. As soon as Miss Harrison can get estates to give her a maths department trophy cabinet, the Hans Woyda cup will begin its residence at a maths office near you, for the remainder of this year and hopefully more to come.
Written by Oliver (L6M2)