The Abacus 1#8 Illuminati Confirmed 9

by Jack Darrant

he successful candidates for elec‐tion to the Student Council were an‐nounced last Wednesday. Oscar (Chair), Hao-Jing and Zoe (Secre‐tary), Jack (Treasurer), Ursula (Fu‐tures), Elliot (Community & Envi‐ronment) and Amin (Student Voice). As the new Student Council prepares to deal with the issues of the day, such as Kettlegate and the invasion of KCLMS by the Illumi‐nati, the Abacus can reveal the full election results as we look back on the campaign.

by Jack Darrant

Students have expressed their irrita‐tion following a decision by school management to remove the kettle in the cafeteria, citing concerns that it would detract custom from the hot drinks machine. KCLMS has said that it would consider students views, inviting the student body to present a petition on the issue if they are dissatisied. No petition has been circulated yet, but much frustration has been vented at 'Kettlegate', the hottest debate of 2015.

Students have complained that be‐ing expected to pay 20 pence (the price was lowered at the beginning of the school year) for a cup of water

Chair

his contest was a real nail biter. here were six candidates, but un‐usually no frontrunners emerged during the campaign, so the result was entirely unpredictable.

Round 1: Oscar (20), Abdullah (3), Riu (9), Lauren (9), Joseph (19), RON (1). On the irst count, two clear possible winners emerge. he others have put in a pretty strong performance but are unlikely to make any headway. Ron is eliminat‐ed, and his vote is transferred to Joseph, equalising him with Oscar. Abdullah is then next to go: 2 of his votes go to Oscar and 1 to Joseph, pushing him just behind the win‐ning post.

Round 3: Oscar (22), Riu (9), Lauren (9), Joseph (21). In the event of a tie between candidates for elimination or victory, it is common practice to lip a coin. In this case, it didn't mat‐ter which of Riu or Lauren was elim‐

inated irst, as even if one trans‐ferred all of their votes to the other, the surviving candidate would have 18 votes and would be next for elim‐

ination. And thus Riu dropped out irst. His supporters lent strongly to‐wards Oscar, who gains 7 votes.

Round 4: Oscar (29), Lauren (9), Joseph (23). Still no winners on the penultimate round! How close can it get? Well, even closer it seems. Lau‐ren's 9 votes are transferred, 6 to Joseph and 1 to Oscar. 2 voters ex‐pressed no preference between the two, and so were discounted. If they hadn't been, the result could have been completely different. Lauren's pro-Joseph voters do not quite counterbalance Riu's pro-Oscar sup‐porters.

Round 5: Oscar (30), Joseph (29). And so Oscar is elected Chair, with a single vote in it. Never let it be said that one vote never makes a differ‐ence!

KCLMS In Hot Water As

Kettlegate Reaches

Boiling Point

Continued page 2

Your New Student Council: Full Results

2 he Abacus

Student Voice

Round 1: Amin (33), Charlie (5), Chris (21), RON (2). Here, Mr Charisma (a.k.a. Amin), clears the 50% hurdle in the irst round.

In later rounds, RON's second choices go entirely towards Chris and Charlie's go entirely towards Amin. he hypothetical inal round result would thus be Amin (37), Chris (22).

1. Has the Las Vegas Tourism Board starting sponsoring our MSD lessons?

2. How is RON going to advance his evil plans ater his crushing defeats?

3. Does the Illuminati offer work experience to enthusiastic sixth formers?

4. Are all farmed pigs capable of verbalising their mathematical reasoning?

5. How are students expected to work with so little whiteboard space available?

6. Can we conduct the admis‐sions interviews this week?

7. When did 'Lord' Howard hap‐pen, exactly?

8. If any KCLMS robotics engi‐neers do ly off to China, will they be bringing the press with t h e m ? ( Yo u d o n ' t l i k e traveling, you fool. Ed.)

9. Do you read the Pi News? If not, why not? It is a great way to spend some time in your day.

10. Why is the letter 'y' not a vowel?

Futures

Round 1: Kay (15), Rene (8), Ursula (34), RON (4). Ursula wins on the irst round by a convincing margin (55.8% of the vote). his contest was RON's strongest performance, but he is still in last place.

In further rounds, Ursula picks up a single vote each from RON and Rene, while Kay picks up three votes from Rene. he inal result would be: Ursula (36), Kay (18), a mathe‐matically pleasing two-to-one ma‐jority.

Secretary

If you thought the Chair contest was close, you haven't seen this.

Round 1: Hao-Jing (29), Zoe (29), RON (2). Did you notice that only 60 people voted, rather than 61 for Chair? Another feeble performance by RON, who drops out but does not transfer any votes.

Round 2: Hao-Jing (29), Zoe (29). he candidates are invited to lip a coin to break the deadlock, but they instead ask to share the job. Fine in this context, but if Ed Miliband and David Cameron try to pull that stunt in May, don't let them!

that is insufficiently heated to pre‐pare meals with is an unfair deal, and the need to ban kettles for stu‐dent use- but notably not staff use- indicates that customers are being forced to pay more then necessary for an inferior product. It seems stu‐dents are well acquainted with the Business Studies syllabus.

On the other hand, supporters of the kettle ban would argue that if a kettle were provided, custom for the drinks machine could drop off sharply. While it is hard to imagine demand for old favourites like Chocomilk disappearing, inancial analysts have suggested that proits from the machine could fall 'a little bit'. And who can afford to lose money these days?

Treasurer

With 8 options on the ballot paper, this count had the potential to drag

on for several rounds. It didn't, as Jack (hat's you, isn't it? Talking about yourself in the third person. Ed is not amused. Ed.) was elected in the irst round.

Round 1: Jack (36), Joselyn (0), Lauren (3), Libby (2), Marcus (12), Abdullah (1), Yemi (6), RON (1). As we were lucky to have an extremely enthusiastic election administrator in the form of Mr Robson, we have the numbers for further rounds ater that, even though the election out‐come was determined in the irst round.

As the count progressed, second preferences went straight to either Jack or Marcus. Abdullah and Lau‐ren's supporters lent towards Mar‐cus, while Lauren and Yemi's were more or less evenly split. Had it reached the inal round, the result would have been: Jack (41), Marcus (18).

Community and Environment

Round 1: Amy (8), Elliot (50), RON (2). his was the clearest majority of all, perhaps due to Elliot's fantastic campaign posters which showed him undertaking heroic acts of ser‐vice to the community.

Election results in full

10 hings We Want To Know

3he Abacus

by Jack Darrant

Last Friday, once lessons had in‐ished and the working week was but a memory (for students at least) KCLMS students were treated to the combination of two of life's greatest pleasures: mathematics and free popcorn.

he Assembly Room was converted into its full cinematic mode as nu‐m e r o u s m i n i - l e c t u r e s w e r e livestreamed from the London Mathematical Society (former Presi‐dent: Mary Cartwright) in celebra‐tion of their 150th anniversary. Un‐usually for events that are streamed live over the Internet, it seems that the receiver was not plagued by technical problems (we can now cal‐culate the extremely slim probability of that using our new MSD knowl‐edge).

KCLMS is keen to offer its students access to anumber of mathematical lectures and events that may be of interest to them, so watch this space for news!

Photo credit: HJ

by Jack Darrant

he mystery of the activities of Heros Herosinos, exiled leader of the Kudos Liberation Front, has been solved ater the WikiLeaks published the iles of the Help for Heros campaign. he Abacus asked Julian Assange for a response to ac‐cusations that he was endangering Heros by revealing sensitive infor‐mation about his movements. As‐sange told our reporter to "chillax" and asked him to "turn that torch off " before leaving the dark, rubbish strewn cupboard that houses Mr As‐sange in the Ecudorian embassy.

Given that convincing argument, we have decided to publish the reports. Heros let the increasingly unstable KCLMS dependency of Kudos in November 2014, when Tom Cruise was hired to assassinate him. Dis‐guised as a bag of frozen peas, Heros smuggled himself onto a rickshaw bound for Saudi Arabia, where he went undercover as a manager of the state oil company. He only attracted the suspicion of his employers when he was seen selling a million barrels of crude oil to ASDA for €0.03 (about a year's earnings for a Ku‐dosser goat shepherd) apiece. One oil price crash later, Heros was sacked.

Desperate to earn money and evade detection by the authorities (which are controlled by the Illuminati) Heros rode a weather balloon to Py‐ongyang, where he exchanged the bit of string he had been holding for a job as Head Chef to Kim Jong Un. Despite this git of highly advanced

technology to the Dear Leader of the DPRK, it did not take long for Heros to displease his new master. It emerged that Mr Un had little pa‐tience with Kuddosser cuisine. Ater Heros prepared a pea shell soup for Christmas dinner, the Leader de‐manded his execution.

Analysts have told the Abacus that a career in goat shepherding probably

gave Heros the lightning-fast reac‐tions that he needed to run through the compound, dodging the spears and swords thrown by soldiers. Help for Heros records show that the leader managed to steal North Korea's entire nuclear arsenal (a ket‐tle which contains two atoms of re‐ined uranium and a giant elastic band to ire it) and brought it with him as he dug a tunnel from the DPRK border to Shoreditch. he en‐gineering project took him a week.

he last communication from Heros was an email sent on the 10th of Jan‐uary from the Treasury at 11 Down‐ing Street. At that time, Heros was alive and well working as George Osborne's personal shoeshiner, but is understood that he lost the nucle‐ar weapon on the Tube. He advised the Help for Heros campaign that it had made its way to the TFL lost property office, and could therefore be anywhere.

Students Celebrate

LMS' 150th Year

Heros' Activities Leaked

4 he Abacus

by Varun

by Amy Sellers

Mary Lucy Cartwright was born on the 17th of December 1900 in Ayn‐ho, Norhamptonshire. When she was eleven years old, she was sent away to boarding school, irst Leam‐

ington High School, and then Godophin School in Salisbury. At irst, her passion was for history, but she was encouraged in her studies of mathematics- the subject she would later study at university.

In her irst year at university, classes were over crowded (illed with male student who had returned from war), and she struggled to gain entry and thus, sufficient notes. To her

great disappointment, she earned only a second degree in mathemat‐ics in 1921. She contemplated changing courses to her childhood passion of history, but decided to pursue math as it was 'easier'. She kept on studying mathematics at St Hugh's College, Oxford, inally graduating in 1923 with a irst class degree. She was the irst women ob‐tain a irst.

When at Oxford, she was one of o n l y 5 w o m e n s t u d y i n g mathematics. Ater completing her degree, she taught at several schools, before returning to Oxford in 1928 to study for her doctorate: her thesis was on zeros of entire functions. his was published in the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics.

In 1930, she was awarded a Yarrow Research Fellowship and went to Cambridge to continue her doctoral thesis. She created a theorem (now known as Cartwright's theorem), which 'gives an estimate for the maximum modulus of an analytic function that takes the same value, no more than P times'. his is widely used today. Another great achieve‐

ment, was simplifying Hermites ele‐mentary proof of the irrationality of Pi, in 1945. his was then published in an appendix to Sir Harold Jeffrey's book 'Scientiic inference'.

Cartwright had a distinguished ca‐reer in analytical function theory, and university administration, pub‐lishing over 100 papers on classical analysis, differential equations and related topological problems. In 1936, Cartwright become director of studies in mathematics at Girton College until 1948 when she was ap‐pointed Mistress of Girton.

She was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947; and although she was not the irst women to be elected, she was the irst female mathematician. She was however, the irst women to: receive the Sylvester medal; serve on the Coun‐cil of the Royal Society; and be Pres‐ident of the London Mathematical Society. Ater her retirement, Cartwright held visiting professor‐ships at universities in England, America and Poland. She died in Cambridge on April 3rd, 1998.

he Revision Guide (Mini Edition)

Who was Mary

Cartwright?

Inspirational Quote #8