Students triumph at UKMT Senior Maths Challenges

Two students from Year 13 at Stamford School have qualified for the UK Senior Maths Challenge follow on rounds, coordinated by the United Kingdom Mathematical Trust (UKMT).Lawrence Zhu has been invited to compete in the Senior Kangaroo, an hour-long challenge consisting of twenty problems, where each answer is a positive integer less than one thousand.Xiaotong Cui has been invited to participate in the British Mathematical Olympiad Round One, a three-and-a-half-hour competition consisting of six problems, requiring full written solutions. Four students from the Stamford Endowed School’s Sixth Form have also achieved third place in the Senior Maths Team Challenge Regional Final, also co-ordinated by UKMT.Sixteen schools competed in the event, each entering a team of four students. Stamford’s team, Xiaotong Cui and Arun Anand, both Year 13, and Dennis Zeng and Mia Taylor, both Year 12, had to compete in several stages over the afternoon of the competition, which was held at Arthur Mellows School in Peterborough.Initially, the group round involved students working to solve ten questions in an allocated timescale. This was followed by a ‘Crossnumber’ challenge, which is similar to a crossword, but with numerical answers. The final task of the day involved a shuttle; teams competing against the clock to correctly answer a series of four questions, where the answer to each question is dependent on the answer to the previous.Mrs Susan Manning, Head of Mathematics at Stamford School, said: “The students did extremely well, beating last year’s performance, which was fourth place.“The team did so well against really strong competition, beating Bourne Grammar, Oakham and Kings, Peterborough.“There were very few points between first and third place, and so the team are certainly in with a chance of getting through to the national finals!”