Head's Newsletter 19 January 2018

UKMT Senior Maths Challenges

The large quantity of fully working pro- grams was incredibly encouraging, with some excellent scores achieved by many. Special congratulations should go to Vin- cent Trieu (Yr12) and Ojas Gulati (Yr8) achieving 86% and 84% respectively, clearly not content with their recent Distinctions in the British Maths Olympiad. These marks we hope will result in invitations to the Na- tional Final in Cambridge later in the year. CROSS COUNTRY On Saturday 13th January the Knole Run took place at Sevenoaks in Kent. This is a tough race; aside from being the longest, it includes a number of challenging hills with very muddy terrain. Despite this challenge and three of our leading runners impeded by illness or injury we finished 6 places up from last year! Our first runner over the line was Eric Williams (11EWS) who was 32 nd out of more than 200 runners. He was followed by Aaron Bruce (13HB), Kai Pisch- ke (12 AC), Kieran Desmond (12MKY) and Jamie Krammer (12 MKY). A top 14 place in the country was a great result.

On Tuesday 7 November 118 Tiffinians sat the UKMT Senior Maths Challenge. We have become accustomed to excellent re- sults and this year was no exception with 41 boys qualifying for the two prestigious follow on rounds. In addition Vincent Trieu achieved full marks on this paper – a very rare feat. This week we have received the results back from the UKMT Kangaroo competition (one of the follow-on rounds). A remarkable 13 boys have achieved a cer- tificate of merit – the highest possible achievement in the Kangaroo paper and roughly equivalent to being in the top 2000 Sixth Form mathematicians national- ly. The results from the 9 boys who quali- fied for the other follow-on round, The British Maths Olympiad, are still awaited. On Monday 8 January, 10 students took part in the British Informatics Olympiad, a 3 hour programming competition requiring students to produce code for 3 different problems of increasing difficulty. The com- petition is targeted at older students, but it was heartening to see so much enthusiasm from a number of year groups, with years 8, 9, 10 and 12 represented. British Informatics Olympiad

On January 14 th Will Potter 13MH, aka Cor- poral Will Potter, represented Kingston Air Training Corps as a senior (17½ yrs +) in the Surrey Wing Cross Country competition at Kenley Airfield. After finishing in first place he was requested to represent Surrey at the London and South East Region (LASER) Cross Country competition on January 28 th . Many congratulations to him.