QE won two first places in the All England Grammar School Mathematician of the Year (GSMOTY) competition for the second consecutive year.
Saim Khan, who enters Year 13 in September, was the winner for Key Stage 5, while William Joanes, who goes into Year 12, was first in the Key Stage 4 category. QE also featured among the Key Stage 3 high-flyers, with Aaryan Prabhaker, who will be in Year 9, the runner-up for that age group.
The results, announced during the summer, are for the 2023 competition. In 2022, QE pupils were also among the winners, taking first place for Key Stages 3 & 4.
Head of Mathematics Jessica Steer said: “Our congratulations go to Saim, William and Aaryan for their individual performances and for representing the School so well. More than a third of all the country’s grammar schools took part in this year’s competition, with thousands of competitors, and the competition organisers have said the standard was higher than ever. So the achievement of these three pupils is considerable.”
GSMOTY is organised by a division of education company Mathema Events Limited 2023. The GSMOTY website states: “Our competition aims to ignite an interest for maths in a fun and innovative way for all abilities.”
Entering GSMOTY involves sitting an interactive, online mathematics paper at home. Each of the three age categories has a separate 50-question examination, with an optional extra tie-break question at the end.
The competition includes questions drawn from the curriculum specification for the relevant key stage, as well as material which extends slightly beyond it. For the Key Stage 5 examination, for example, areas covered included: exponentials; logarithms & log rules; series summation; differentiation; and integration.
Saim described taking part as “an amazing experience – a true test of problem-solving skills and lateral thinking, as you extended concepts learnt in class in directions you hadn’t covered before. It was immensely enjoyable, with my favourite style of questions being those on integration because – whilst they often looked the hardest – they often had some of the most elegant solutions. Winning was the icing on the cake!”
The questions were set by GSMOTY’s chief examiner, Professor James Preston. The papers were marked by ten Heads of Mathematics from state secondary schools that are not grammar schools.