Maths news!

Many good things have happened since I last posted! Firstly, I have nearly finished my mathletics course: I have 202 gold bars, and only 7 more to go (all on the money topic). I finally understand all the calculus topics (sort of). I hope I finish soon, maybe this week (it's the first week of my summer holiday).

I also took part in the On Your Marks Maths Challenge last week, I ended up in the top 100 students, and I was the fifth secondary student in England! I was quite amazed about it. It took about 12 hours' play over the two days, my eyes and hands were so sore at the end, although it's totally worth it!

I also sat my maths test at school on Monday and Tuesday this week, I was the only person in my class to get over 90% (I got 96%). I would have liked to have got 100%, obviously, but I made some very silly mistakes: I stated that the gradients of perpendicular lines multiply to make -1, and then accidently used -1 as the gradient of the required line rather than -2. This made a follow through question about the intersecton of two lines rather difficult, however I managed not to miss any more marks on that paper (I got 43/44 on the non calculator). On Tuesday, I sat the calculator paper, I forgot to write "stationary points occur when f'(x) = 0" on an optimisation question, and I also had a question about numbers excluded from a domain when a quadratic expression was on the bottom of a fraction, and I factorised incorrectly and lost another mark. So all very silly marks, leaving me with 71/74, but you can't always get full marks!

Keep checking back for more updates!