The Putnam Competition
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, hosted by the Mathematical Association of America, is an annual math contest written by undergraduate students across North America. The top individual prize is $2500 and almost certainly a full scholarship for grad school at any university in the world. The top team prize is $25000 for the winning university.
The competition is written annually on the first Saturday in December. Our time zone writes between 8 AM and 4 PM.
For more info about the contest and its history, see the Official Contest page and the Wikipedia page.
The UFV Putnam Club
The UFV Putnam Club meets weekly during Fall semesters.
You may attend the meetings without planning to write the contest, and you may write the contest without having attended any of the meetings. In order to write the contest, though, you must be registered as a participant by early October, or take the place of another registered participant by mid-November.
Note that the 2020 Putnam Contest overall was cancelled due to COVID. While the 2021 Putnam Contest did run, the UFV Putnam Club didn't come together in Fall of 2021 due to COVID.
For more info about the UFV Putnam Club meetings, and/or to register as a participant in the 2024 competition, contact Almaz Butaev at Almaz.Butaev@ufv.ca.
The glorious 2023 Putnam Team was:
- Joshua Kerdachi
- Xueru Cui
The back-at-it 2022 Putnam Team was:
- Brendan Matthews
- Kian Johnson
The in-it-2-win-it 2019 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Tanner Boos
- Emily Ell
The seven-deadly-sines 2018 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Tanner Boos
- Chris Brechin
- Carson Chambers
- Timothy Dirks
- Emily Ell
- Desiree Epp
- Rebecca Robertson
The back-4-more 2017 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Colin Baird
- Tanner Boos
- Shane Callander
- Dillon Duncan
The pen-tagonal 2016 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Tanner Boos
- Shane Callendar
- Dillon Duncan
- Cameron Grant
- Miranda Louwerse
The even luckier seven 2015 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Shane Callendar
- Cameron Grant
- Joseph Haddad
- Robert Haycock
- Miranda Louwerse
- Raynah McIvor
- Benjamin Tremblay
The lucky seven 2014 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Etienne Dreyer
- Dillon Duncan
- Robert Haycock
- Miranda Louwerse
- Raynah McIvor
- Emily Scoular
- Benjamin Tremblay
The strength-in-numbers 2013 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Sung il Anh
- Meldon Deglint
- Kevin Kobes
- Miranda Louwerse
- Brie Mackovic
- Ryan Peck
- Emily Scoular
- Juffrey Suchinsky
- Kenneth Vanderlinde
- Aaron Wijngaarden
- Yulong (David) Zhang
The stealthy 2012 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Brendan Bulthuis (4th year math major)
- Aaron Wijngaarden(3rd year math major)
The undeterred 2011 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Sung il Anh (Grade 9, Yale Secondary School)
- Christopher Dugdale (4th year math major)
- Emily Scoular (2nd year math major)
- Kenneth Vanderlinde (3rd year math major)
The first-come-first-served 2010 UFV Putnam Team was:
- Evan Cook (2nd year physics major)
- Slava Minin (4th year computing science major)
- Kenneth Vanderlinde (2nd year math major)
- Matthew Wiersma (4th year math major)
Practice problems
- View an archive of all Putnam competitions from 1985-2011 with solutions from 1995-2014.
- Visit a discussion forum on some previous problems and solutions.
- Find books with previous Putnam problems and solutions
The following two PDF documents contain some introductory problems, and many of the easier Putnam problems from recent years. They are a good place to start looking for friendly and do-able problems. (Thanks to Chris Dugdale for tracking down these documents.)
- Easy Putnam Problems (Relatively speaking, that is)
- Putnam Training Problems 2005
This file is awesome. Following several dozen problems which are categorized by solution style, there are short hints for each, then solutions for each.
Course Notes
The following files were compiled by Anna Kuczynska as course notes for the first three main topics that we covered in Fall 2010: The Principle of Mathematical Induction, The Pigeonhole Principle, and Inequalities.