Contact Dr. Paul Pollack (pollack@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 Year Team Rank High Scorer at UGA Score # Participants 1991 -- Paul Jones/Eddie Fuller 11 5 1992 133 Paul Jones 13 10 1993 118 Paul Jones 27 8 1994 106 Stephen Griffin 28.4 7 1995 102 Adrian Daigle 22 9 1996 42 Stephen Griffin 21 10 1997 54 Shawn Walker 20 6 1998 37 Charles Mathis 60 10 1999 88 Paul Pollack 30 15 2000 20 Paul Pollack 40 13 2001 57 Paul Pollack 69 7 2002 39 Boris Alexeev 59 9 2003 -- Penny Ridgdill 11 10 2004 -- Adam King 28 12 2005 101 Paul Morrill 27 11 2006 43 Tyler Kelly 21 17 2007 62 Phillip Mote 24 17 2008 106 Tyler Kelly 21 9 2009 -- Zachary Freeland 20 11 2010 -- Jacob Rooney 22 8 2011 -- Tori Akin 10 13 2012 -- Malik Obeidin 30 12 2013 136 Doug Morgan 19 13 2014 86 Sarah Tammen 28 9 2015 117 Sarah Tammen 10 10 2016 -- Ryan Pattillo 11 7 2017 120 Nicholas Lindell/Ryan Pattillo 20 9 2018 179 Nicholas Lindell 20 4 2019 -- Alex Coats 10 5 2021 157 Tate Poole 10 3 2022 *** Joseph Lang 4 2 2023 *** Rohan Singh 23 4 2024 91 Benjamin Wang-Tie 20 5 Other Links Dave Rusin's Putnam Web Site
