On 12 November four students from the 11th Grade went to Royal Holloway to participate in a Math competition.

The competition was split into three parts: one group competition where we solved 10 problems together in 45 minutes; one crossword puzzle where the group was split into two students and each group was given clues to either the down or across of the crossword; the relay competition where each answer for each problem was needed to solve the next.

In the group competition we were announced to be in the top 6 out of 13 schools. However the crossword competition was a tough competition, which included problems like the products of the prime factors of four across and five down. What made these tough was that each group could only communicate to each other through the teacher. At the beginning we were all stuck by the problems but once we started getting some of the clues and learning how to guess numbers, we started to get more points. In the last minute we decided to guess numbers to try to pick up as any points as possible and luckily out of 5 guesses we got 4 right. Because the one digit cannot be zero this means the probability of guessing all of those right was 1/52,488.

Finally we moved on to the relay part of the competition. At this point we had to solve four problems in four minutes but each problem depended on the solution to the previous problem. This meant that the first problem had to be right to pick up any points. We were inconsistent in these but came out with more points than most people.

In the end after a three-hour math competition we did not come in the top three but we had tried problems like the crossword that had really challenged our conventional thinking and realised that with teamwork you can solve almost any problem.