The fifteenth group of essays from the 2023 Teddy Rocks Maths Competition. The showcase will take place throughout June and July with the winners being announced at the end.

The competition is organised with St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford and offers a cash prize plus publication on the university website for the winners. It will be running again in early 2024 so be sure to follow Tom (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to make sure you don’t miss the announcement!

This essay looks at the mathematics of Ancient Egypt and how they used the decomposition of fractions.

Harishan derives the SIR model for disease spread and shows how it is well-posed.

This essay explains what the pigeonhole principle is and how it can be used to solve problems.

Leo provides an overview of the properties of a hypercube and its various appearances in popular culture.

Pedro analyses common voting systems and concludes they will always be unfair.

James applies a range of mathematical techniques to analyse the Rubik’s Cube.

Hanan shows how probability theory was used successfully to solve a real world problem.

This essay investigates the Fibonacci Sequence in relation to the shift operator.

Joshua takes the reader on a historical journey from Napier to Euler.

This essay links music, videos and drawings using the Fourier Transform.

Claudia looks at how graph theory was used to solve the infamous Konigsberg Bridge problem.

This essay analyses the game of Dobble and uses maths to determine the optimal strategy.