Foxx
05-10-2005, 10:06 PM
http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/putnam/
The Putnam Competition is a math contest that undergraduates from universities all around the country take part in. The university with the 3 best individual scores gets $25,000, a prize of no small change (and the three contestants each get $1,000); the five highest individual scores each also receive a prize of $2,500. It's a six-hour test, two blocks of 3 hours each with time in between for lunch. In each block you are given 6 problems. They involve a variety of tasks such as finding the smallest rectangle that two squares will fit into, or finding the product of an infinite sequence of factors. Each problem is worth up to 10 points, and one thing that they all have in common, is that they are HARD. Not only the problems but the grading of the answers are vicious, and almost half of the thousands of participants wind up scoring zero out of 120 points possible. I took the Putnam once, in my senior year of college (the 2001 competition), and scored 11, which was good for the 75th percentile or thereabouts (thanks to solving B-3).
You can try your own skills on this relatively accessible set of problems, from the 1996 competition. The PDF (http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/putnam/-pdf/1996.pdf) and PostScript (http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/putnam/-ps/1996.ps) versions are here, whichever one you can load more easily. I think I should mention that I was able to solve three of these problems on my own. Had I been born a few years earlier and been fortunate enough to take part in this competition, I would have scored 30. That would have been a seriously good showing.
The Putnam Competition is a math contest that undergraduates from universities all around the country take part in. The university with the 3 best individual scores gets $25,000, a prize of no small change (and the three contestants each get $1,000); the five highest individual scores each also receive a prize of $2,500. It's a six-hour test, two blocks of 3 hours each with time in between for lunch. In each block you are given 6 problems. They involve a variety of tasks such as finding the smallest rectangle that two squares will fit into, or finding the product of an infinite sequence of factors. Each problem is worth up to 10 points, and one thing that they all have in common, is that they are HARD. Not only the problems but the grading of the answers are vicious, and almost half of the thousands of participants wind up scoring zero out of 120 points possible. I took the Putnam once, in my senior year of college (the 2001 competition), and scored 11, which was good for the 75th percentile or thereabouts (thanks to solving B-3).
You can try your own skills on this relatively accessible set of problems, from the 1996 competition. The PDF (http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/putnam/-pdf/1996.pdf) and PostScript (http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/putnam/-ps/1996.ps) versions are here, whichever one you can load more easily. I think I should mention that I was able to solve three of these problems on my own. Had I been born a few years earlier and been fortunate enough to take part in this competition, I would have scored 30. That would have been a seriously good showing.