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 includes full tuition for graduate school at Harvard, plus $12,000.
For more info about the contest and its history, see the Official Contest page and the Wikipedia page.
The UFV Putnam Club
The first meeting of the 2011 UFV Putnam Club is on Wednesday, October 12, from 1-2:30 PM in room A225 on Abbotsford campus. Following that, the 2011 Putnam club will meet on Wednesdays, Oct 19-Nov 30 inclusive, from 4-5:20 PM (in room D225 on Oct 19, then in room C1429 from then on). The 2011 Putnam competition is on Saturday, December 3.
For more info about the UFV Putnam Club meetings, and/or to register as a participant in the 2011 competition, contact Ian Affleck at ian.affleck@ufv.ca
The 2010 UFV Putnam Club met several times in Fall 2010, discussing problems and solution techniques from former contests, in preparation to enter a team in the 2010 contest on December 4.
Congratulations to UFV's 2010 Putnam team, composed of:
- Matthew Wiersma (4th year math major)
- Even Cook (2nd year physics major)
- Slava Minin (4th year computing science major)
- Kenneth Vanderlinde (2nd year math major)
The competition questions that they were faced with can be viewed here:
http://amc.maa.org/a-activities/a7-problems/putnam/-pdf/2010.pdf
Practice Problems
Previous problems and solutions from the past 25 years can be found here:
http://amc.maa.org/a-activities/a7-problems/putnamindex.shtml
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.)
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.
