The Mathematics department would like to congratulate sixth form students Luke Bligh, Joe Barton, Siddiq Islam and Billy Hughes for their recent performances in the British Olympiad Round 1 (BMO1).
The BMO1 examination lasts three and a half hours, which is almost incomprehensible to most mortals, and consists of six extremely challenging questions, acting as the preliminary stage to select the British mathematics team. Indeed, only 1,000 pupils qualify for the BMO1.
Billy, who is in the lower sixth, scored an impressive 14 out of a possible 60 marks. To put this into context, the best lower sixth student at KCS Wimbledon last year scored six, and their best upper sixth student scored 29! Remarkably, Luke, fresh from his interview at Cambridge to read Engineering, scored 29, just missing out on a distinction. Joe and Siddiq, who have also recently had interviews to read Mathematics at Cambridge and Oxford respectively, went one step further, receiving distinctions with scores of 37 and 36.
Fred Jimack and Dylan Hutcheson, both in the upper sixth, performed extremely well in the Kangaroo round which is taken by those students who comfortably achieve a gold award in the Senior Maths Challenge, but who do not score highly enough to take the BMO1. I am also delighted to be able to report that for the first time in Emanuel’s history, two Year 11 pupils, Harry Still and Oscar Chin, qualified for and did very well in the Kangaroo round. Indeed, there is great strength in depth in Year 11, and we have some marvellous mathematicians including Lucy Mountain, Freya Mills, Atitiya Vichayanrat, Sam Routledge, Matthew Durrant and Harry Mountain in the lower year groups. The mathematical future of Emanuel looks bright and exciting!
Finally, all of the above students deserve great credit, as does Miss Sidhu who gives up so much of her time to organise these events.
Mr Leadbetter (Teacher of Mathematics)