Word: putnam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...seem low to Harvard students used to taking SATs and Math 21a examinations, the majority of the test-takers don’t even receive full credit for a single problem. According to Ravi Vakil, co-author of a book on the competition from 1985-2000 and the Putnam coordinator at Stanford, the median score is usually zero or one. “Keeping in mind that the people taking the Putnam are self-selected from the smartest mathematical minds in the continent, this undoubtedly is the hardest test in the world,” Vakil writes...
Still, even though the department gets a cash prize for successful competitors, taking the Putnam is not a concentration requirement and no one is compelled to compete. They’re just there to have a good time. As Carroll says, for these students, “it’s just...
Andrei Jorza ’05, a 2001 Putnam high-scorer, attributes Putnam participation to students’ desires to relive high school contest math memories. “I call it nostalgia of high school,” says Jorza, a two-time member of the Romanian team for the International Math Olympiad (IMO), over a fly-by meal in Loker. “Most people who went to the IMO are not very serious about [the Putnam]. When you’re doing a competition, it’s the atmosphere of people trying to solve problems...
Indeed, nearly every student, especially the math concentrators, and every professor took care to emphasize that the Putnam is no perfect measure of actual math ability. Elkies, peering through his turtle shell-rimmed glasses, explains that “beyond a point, the ability to do tricky problems without a book, fast, is less and less a part of your math. In the real world, we use references, ask our peers, use the computer...
...Math competitions are very much like spelling bees—they’re arbitrary” Schwartz says. “[The Putnam] is just a college version of an arithmetic contest in elementary school...