UFV Putnam Club

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Information taken from the Math and Statistics website.

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.

For more info about the contest and its history, see the Official Contest page and the Wikipedia page.

The UFV Putnam Club

The 2013 UFV Putnam Club met on Tuesdays, Sept 17 – Dec 3 inclusive in room A 402. The 2013 Putnam competition will take place on Saturday, December 7, 8 AM – 4 PM.

For more info about the UFV Putnam Club meetings, and/or to register as a participant in the 2013 competition, contact Ian Affleck at ian.affleck@ufv.ca

The 2012 UFV Putnam Team was:

  • Brendan Bulthuis (4th year math major)
  • Aaron Wijngaarden(3rd year math major)

Here are the competition questions that they were faced with: Part A , Part B

The 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)

Here are the competition questions that they were faced with: Part A , Part B

The 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

An archive of some previous problems and solutions can be found here:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/viewforum.php?f=80

Books with previous Putnam problems and solutions are available here:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/contests.php?contest=putnam

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.