<p>Hi,
I guess I'll be writing it soon enough. I was wondering if there are any exceptionally good books for preparing the qualifiers. Any recommendations?</p>
<p>Don't these qualifiers vary a lot from school to school (unless you're thinking about the GRE)?</p>
<p>Many universities publish a list of books that cover the material for the qualifying exams. What is your area, though? For instance, if it's real or complex analysis, Rudin's "Real and Complex Analysis" is really great and fairly comprehensive. Also, lots of universities publish old quals (see Princeton's website; the grad students there publish the questions that they're asked in their oral exam).</p>
<p>It varies too much from program to program to say. Your school should have prepared you for the exam and made clear to you what was expected. If you still feel you need more guidance on what to review (and most students seek out whatever they can get, so don't feel bad), speak to your advisor about it. He/she should be able to steer you better than us.</p>
<p>If you want to work on being creative, just write a few Putnams, haha!</p>
<p>Heh, it's the other way around, mostly. I wanted to take a look at some of the quals to prepare for Putnam, as well as getting ready for the qualifiers themselves.</p>
<p>So I guess my next question is, where can i find the list of the published qualifiers?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>A good link is <a href="http://www.math.ufl.edu/other/quals.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.math.ufl.edu/other/quals.html</a>. Especially check out Princeton's entry on that list.</p>
<p>I'm not sure how helpful these will be for Putnam prep, though --- usually, qualifying exams test knowledge of relatively higher-level concepts, and specifically application of field-specific theorems, while the Putnam tests creativity in working in relatively basic fields. On this year's Putnam, I can't think of any problem which required anything about vector calculus. Of course, working qualifying exams could help, in that the more math one does, the more comfortable one is in general.</p>
<p>Actually, studying qualifying exams is probably a really terrible way to study for the Putnam. The Putnam exam does not require any advanced knowledge that you would learn from graduate courses. It tests your ability to think creatively in solving problems. On the other hand, qualifying exams can test your ability to creatively use information you know to solve problems, but they require very advanced and technical machinery that is much above the level of the Putnam material. You might be hurting yourself in the end for the Putnam if you study that way.</p>
<p>The absolute best way to study for the Putnam is to look at exams from previous years and probably also from some of the high school olympiads (which are similar in that they test your creativity with working with problems).</p>
<p>Thanks for the link, it'll help a lot!
I've actually been involved in high school olympiads, so all I really need is a few concepts like calculus and maybe some higher algebra the high school olympiads did not deal with. Thanks to everyone who replied!</p>