2009 Putnam Mathematical Competition Results Announced (news item)

Colleges and Universities A-Z Princeton University
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<p>William</a> Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>

<p>The results of the 2009 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition have been announced. The Putnam competition is widely considered the most prestigious math competition for college undergraduates in the U.S. and Canada and is administered out of the Department of Mathematics at Harvard which houses the offices of the Mathematical Association of America. Teams from 546 universities competed this year, including (I believe) all of the Ivy League schools. There were 4,036 individual test takers. </p>

<p>This year, MIT took first place while Princeton took fifth, a drop from second place last year. The top five teams are singled out for honors and this year, the list of those schools is the same as last year, just in a different order. This year's top teams were:</p>

<p>2009 Putnam Team Finishes</p>

<p>1st --- MIT
2nd --- Harvard
3rd --- CalTech
4th --- Stanford
5th --- Princeton</p>

<p>Top Five Finishes in the Last 20 Years</p>

<p>19 --- Harvard
14 --- MIT
13 --- Princeton
12 --- Duke
8 ---- U. of Waterloo
7 ---- CalTech
6 ---- Stanford<br>
4 ---- U. of Toronto
3 ---- Cornell, WUSTL
2 ---- U. of Chicago, Harvey Mudd, Michigan, Berkeley & Yale
1 ---- U. of Miami</p>

<p>Top Five Finishes in the Last 10 Years</p>

<p>9 --- Harvard & MIT
7 --- Princeton & Duke
5 --- CalTech</p>

<p>Top Five Finishes in the Last 5 Years</p>

<p>5 --- Princeton, Harvard & MIT
3 --- Stanford
2 --- Duke
2 --- CalTech
1 --- U. of Chicago, Toronto & Waterloo</p>

<p>The top five individual scorers are named Putnam Fellows. This year's Fellows, in alphabetical order, are:</p>

<p>William Johnson, U. of Washington (Seattle)
Xiaosheng Mu, Yale
Qingchun Ren, MIT
Arnav Tripathy, Harvard<br>
Yufei Zhao, MIT </p>

<p>Of particular note here is Xiaosheng Mu, a brilliant young mathematician who is a freshman and a great catch for Yale which often doesn't attract the strongest math students. He is Yale's first Putnam Fellow in 20 years and will no doubt be a future star.</p>

<p>Among all of the remaining highest individual scorers (N1, N2 and Honorable Mention) the following schools were represented:</p>

<p>26 --- MIT
11 --- CalTech
8 ---- Harvard, Princeton
5 ---- Stanford
3 ---- Waterloo</p>

<p>MIT students have almost always constituted the largest contingent of test takers from any single university.</p>

<hr>

<p>For those interested in studying math at Princeton, the following links will be helpful. Princeton has a long and storied history in mathematics. One current professor is Andrew Wiles who became famous for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem which had been one of the great unsolved mathematics problems for over three centuries. Wiles was knighted by the British government for his proof.</p>

<p>Mathematics</a> Department - Princeton University - Undergraduate Homepage
Mathematics</a> Department - Princeton University</p>

<p>(thanks go to Prof. Kent Merryfield for the early reporting of the Putnam results)</p>

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<p>Has there been a Yale freshman Putnam Fellow before? I’m kind of lazy to check, but the fact that there’s so few Yale Putnam Fellows on top of the fact that he’s a freshman is just absolutely amazing. I almost forgot he also tied with Alex Zhai in the IMO for first place.</p>

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<p>YESSSS I knew UWaterloo would be put in there! Go Canada!</p>

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<p>PtonGrad2000 somehow conveniently ignored the following ranking… </p>

<p>The following table lists Teams with First place finishes (as of 2009[update] competition):</p>

<p>First Place Team (s)
27 Harvard<br>
9 Caltech<br>
6 MIT<br>
4 Toronto,Washington U in StL<br>
3 Brooklyn College, Duke, Michigan State<br>
2 Brooklyn Polytech, Cornell, Waterloo<br>
1 UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Case Western Reserve, Chicago, Princeton, Queen’s</p>

<p>Princeton have won Putnam competition only ONCE since 1930.</p>

<p>Top math students always go Harvard or MIT.</p>

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<p>Well according to your table and the fact that it’s obviously not ill-conceived/deceptive at all, the top math students always go to Harvard and Caltech, not MIT.</p>

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<p>WOW WHY CAN’T WE EVER WIN PUTNAM (caps).</p>

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<p>You really like to take things to the nth degree! While no reasonable person would say Harvard and MIT(MIT is particularly attractive to math/science people-Harvard and Princeton might be for broader scopes of interests) aren’t great you overlook the top five finishers in the last 10 years. Wouldn’t that be more important to a current budding star in math than what a school has done since 1930? It’s important to preface this all by saying any school finishing in the top five is very impressive on this extraordinary exercise in math and should be considered an exciting possibility for that student. To say that not finishing number one is cause for dismissing a school is just not reasonable.
Don’t be like so many people nowadays that see a conspiracy in everything. The guy was biased for Princeton but not unreasonable in his approach and was accurate statistically.</p>

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<p>Princeton is viewed as good school not top best school. The best students always choose Harvard MIT or Caltech .</p>

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<p>For those of you who are unfamiliar with German_Car, let’s just say he acts as our ‘comic relief’ here on the Princeton board. You’ll see the same very limited set of statistics repeated endlessly by this poster in his quest to denigrate Princeton. He previously appeared under different screen names and will become particularly active just as admission decisions are announced and for the month following as admitted students are making their decisions.</p>

<p>Now, as for the first place finishes in the Putnam Competition.</p>

<p>While the Putnam is, today, a wonderful competition and certainly recognizes the strongest math departments at universities in the U.S. and Canada, it hasn’t always been so. It was founded in 1938 by a Harvard family that wanted to encourage the study of math and it is still run out of the Harvard math department. </p>

<p>Up until about thirty years ago, there was very limited participation in the competition. If you look at the winners in the earliest years, you’ll see many schools represented that do not have particularly strong math departments. Harvard and MIT have participated from the beginning and Harvard, in particular, piled up many first place wins when there were few other strong schools participating. A large number of the schools represented in the top five in the first thirty years of the competition are nowhere to be found in the last thirty years of the competition when the number of schools competing has increased dramatically and the competition has become truly national.</p>

<p>The examination is also somewhat quirky in the sense that the composition of a school’s team is set prior to the examination but the team members don’t work together to solve the problems in the exam. The exam is always taken individually and the combined scores of the three members making up the predetermined “team” are then used to rank the schools’ results. Schools always try to pick their three strongest mathematicians to form their team but frequently, one or more of them will have a bad day and not do as well on the exam as might have been expected. It is for this reason that the standard for team excellence in the exam has long been defined as inclusion in the top five. </p>

<p>The examination is also subject to coaching. This doesn’t occur at Princeton or at Harvard (I don’t know about MIT or CalTech) but many schools make it a priority. </p>

<p>There is no doubt but that Harvard and MIT have extremely strong undergraduate math students and they have dominated the Putnam Competition over the years. In the last ten years or so, MIT has actually had far more Putnam Fellows (defined as those individual test takers whose scores place them in the top five nationally) than Harvard, Princeton or CalTech.</p>

<p>Princeton and CalTech have far smaller numbers of math majors than either of the other two but have also done extremely well in the competition. Their top five team performances attest to that.</p>

<p>The National Research Council Rankings of math and physical sciences departments:</p>

<ol>
<li> Berkeley</li>
<li> MIT</li>
<li> CalTech</li>
<li> Princeton</li>
<li> Harvard</li>
</ol>

<p>U.S. News Rankings of Graduate Programs in Math</p>

<ol>
<li> Princeton</li>
<li> Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Stanford</li>
</ol>

<p>If you see some overlap here between these rankings and the schools with the top performances on the Putnam exam it should come as no surprise.</p>

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<p>Well Every losing team has excuses…</p>

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<p>Remember that a Putnam team doesn’t necessarily make a strong math department. </p>

<p>However, MIT and Harvard are currently the top choices for a sizable majority of those who qualify for MOP (the US Math Olympiad training camp). In part, I would bet that this is more because of MIT’s reputation as a tech school (the culture is that much more math-centric; also, as a current student told me, the HASS requirement is fairly easy to work with) and the ability for MIT and Harvard students to cross-list than because of anyone’s measurement of departmental strength. Caltech, Stanford, and Princeton also get plenty of love from the math contest elite, but most of the top contest students (and I’m just talking about contest winners, not math students in general) will choose MIT or Harvard if given the choice.</p>

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<p>Darling, if you’re devoting 95% of your posts (and a whole lot of ellipses) to disparaging Princeton, we obviously can’t be doing too badly.</p>

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<p>German_car is hilarious. lolz.</p>