Epsom progressed to the knockout stages, based on excellent work last term. Last week’s match placed us, as one of the top 32 schools in the competition, against Sutton High School. Sasha Gershtein, Ali Al Saffar, Yeseong Choi, Angus English, Donald Xing and Lisa Wang made up our team.
The first 20 questions proved difficult for both sides, but Sutton had an early lead of five points until Epsom made a stunning come back in the fourth round – the team question. The challenge, to approximate 12 irrational numbers by fractions, baffled Sutton but was made to look easy by Epsom, with full points awarded to our team. Epsom were now ahead by four points. Epsom dominated the Algebra round, but Sutton firmly won the Race round.
Scores neck and neck
With the scores neck and neck for over 90 minutes, every point lost was painful, especially when solutions arrived one second too late on a few occasions for Epsom. When the final score of 21:21 was announced no one could believe it.
This is a knock-out competition, and so four more tiebreak questions were presented to the tense students. Unbelievably, it was a tie again between Sutton and Epsom. Hans Woyda rules state should a match result in a tie, even after the tie break questions, the winner is determined by the flip of a coin.
Never been a closer match
Sutton won the toss, leaving Epsom shocked but proud of all that they had achieved. According to the organisers of the competition, there has never been a closer match (in over 20 years). This was Epsom’s most successful season, and it promises excellent possibilities for next year. The training begins now.
And for those who wonder if they could match the Epsom Team:
“You are given a list of irrational targets. Calculators are allowed in this round. Time allowed: 5 minutes.
Your task is to find the best rational approximation strictly less than each target in the form a/b where a and b are positive integers and b < 100.”
