UGA Putnam Page

Contact Malcolm Adams at adams@math.uga.edu if you are interested in participating in the Putnam Exam at UGA.

The William Lowell Putnam Competition

The William Lowell Putnam Competition is an annual student math competition sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. More than 3500 students from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada participate in this contest each year. The Putnam competition is held simultaneously at participating universities, usually on the first Saturday of December.

The Putnam competition consists of a morning session and an afternoon session of three hours each. In each session, six problems are to be solved. The problems are graded on a 0 - 10 point scale, for a maximal score of 120 points. The problems are challenging and require considerable ingenuity and insight, but little technical knowledge beyond high school mathematics. It is extremely rare that a contestant solves all 12 problems. For example, in the 2007 Putnam competition, the highest score was 98 points, and a score of 10 (the equivalent of a single problem solved correctly) would have placed a contestant among the top third of all 3753 participants!

The Putnam competition is open to all full time undergraduate students. In addition to the individual competition, there is also a team competition among participating colleges. The team rank of a college is determined by the scores of three participants from that college who have to be named in advance. The team members will, of course, still be ranked as individual contestants. The 25 highest scoring individuals and the five highest scoring teams receive monetary awards.

HISTORY:  

Here is a tabulation of some data of Putnam participation at UGA since 1991

Other Links

Dave Rusin's Putnam Web Site