National mathematics award

Glen Waverley Year 4 student, Niki Lumsden, has been awarded the National Individual Winner in the 2014 National Maths Talent Quest. This is the third year in a row that Niki has was won the national award and as a result, the student activities committee presented him with the Blaise Pascal Award for Outstanding Achievement, a new award created for Niki, that recognises outstanding achievements in mathematics.

The National Maths Talent Quest is held annually, and aims to capture the imagination of students in finding mathematics in real life situations, focusing on the process of mathematical investigations. After being selected from the state talent quest, national winners are selected for displaying excellence in mathematics, and for also excelling in terms of creativity, presentation and communication.

Niki’s award-winning project explored the mathematics of train track layouts, using a wooden toy train track set to count all the different possible tracks using two track points, and then again using four track points. Niki says he thought it would be much easier, but it was challenging “making sure that layouts were really different, and then proving that he hadn't missed any possibilities”.

Entering the Maths Talent Quest has become something Niki looks forward to doing every year. He says “It is interesting to find connections between different areas of maths. For example, I worked out that some simple changes you can make to a track, like swapping over the way things are connected, turn out to be exactly the same sort of changes you can make to shapes like a square by turning it or flipping it. In maths this is an interesting connection between Graph Theory and Group Theory. I also did some interesting stuff with branching track sidings and found a connection between combinatorics and polynomials.”

Niki loves learning maths because “solving problems is fun” and you can always find a harder challenge. His favourite subject to learn at school is “mathematics, of course!”

Wesley College congratulates Niki on an outstanding academic achievement.