Maths quest success takes Kyra to capital

NUMBER ONE: Opaki School pupil Kyra van Geffen, 11, and her winning poster. PHOTO/LYNDA FERINGA

Opaki School pupil Kyra van Geffen is one of 16 budding mathematicians who went to Wellington last week to meet with one of the greatest maths prodigies in the world.

The 16 pupils were prize-winners in The Maths Quest, a poster competition run by the New Zealand Mathematical Society and the New Zealand Association of Mathematics Teachers to celebrate 2013 as the international year of the Mathematics of Planet Earth and the international Year of Statistics.

Kyra, 11, won her place among the winners with a poster titled The Six Most Spoken Languages in the World Today after being asked to produce a poster that expressed the relevance of mathematics to everyday life.

There were seven themes including Unusual Jobs using Mathematics, Mathematics of Life and Mathematics of Planet Earth and Beyond.

The winners came from all around the country including a student from as far away as Pitt Island in the Chatham Islands.

Stella Graydon, who is a Year 8 pupil at Pitt Island School, created a poster on the mathematics behind traffic lights, despite there not being any traffic lights where she lives.

Dr Graham Weir, president of the New Zealand Mathematical Society, says one of the highlights for these talented students was getting to meet Professor Terence Tao.

"Terry is the youngest mathematician to win any of the bronze, silver or gold medals at the International Mathematics Olympiad. He has won the Fields Medal - the equivalent in mathematics of the Nobel Prize. It will be an amazing experience for these students to meet arguably the world's greatest living maths prodigy."

Terence Tao FRS was born in 1975 in Adelaide. According to Smithsonian Online Magazine, Tao could carry out basic arithmetic by the age of 2.

He published his first paper at age 15, and received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the age of 16 from Flinders University.

He earned his PhD at age 20 from Princeton University and at age 24 was made a full professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 2006 he was awarded the Fields Medal for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory.

While in Wellington, in addition to meeting Professor Tao, the winners visited Te Papa and experienced the Awesome Forces exhibition that explains New Zealand's seismic activity.

They also visited Parliament, where they heard from Minister of Youth Affairs and Associate Minister of Education Nikki Kaye. They finished their visit with a trip to Weta Digital, and they didn't leave empty handed. The winners and their teachers each received mini iPads.

The Maths Quest was possible largely because of the generosity of New Zealand's university mathematics and statistics departments or schools (Auckland, AUT, Waikato, Massey, Victoria, Canterbury and Otago), the Alan Wilson Centre and the MacDiarmid Institute, Weta Digital, Statistics New Zealand and Casio, Dr Weir said.

"I thank all of these sponsors for their generosity, which has made The Maths Quest possible, and I hope it will be an inspiring experience for all of the students involved," he said.