Junior Maths Team Success – Top 10 in the UK again!
Our junior maths team – Alex and Matthew in Year 9, together with William and Harry in Year 8 – competed in the national final of the ‘Team Maths Challenge’ competition last month, having earlier earned their place by beating more than 30 Leicestershire schools at a regional heat.
The boys travelled to the Royal Horticultural Halls in central London on Monday 17 June for the final. Teams from all over the UK were there, competing in five rounds, ranging from participating in high speed maths relays, to explaining precisely which lengths and angles can be constructed with a pair of compasses and a straight edge, and also solving a mathematical crossword (a ‘crossnumber’, which uses digits in place of letters).
The boys were excellent throughout, when writing in the first round about the tragically brief but brilliant career of the French mathematician Evariste Galois, and then when showing in the other rounds the mental agility needed to deal with varied and challenging maths problems which had to be solved under real time pressure. They were particularly impressive in the most demanding round, the shuttle relay, in which their score was 55/60.
The LGS team’s overall mark of 87% placed them an excellent 9th in the UK, out of the 1712 teams which entered (that’s at the regional stage – 88 teams were at the national final).
This is the second consecutive year that Loughborough Grammar School has finished in the top ten teams in the country in this contest (and the sixth year in the last eight in which we have been in the top 30 teams in the UK) so the boys have done extremely well again, and against very strong competition.