Dear Students,
The registration for the Putnam competition is just around the corner, October 15th, and I wanted to see how many of you are interested in participating.
If you have no idea what the Putnam competition is about, you can visit https://www.maa.org/math-competitions/putnam-competition for more information.
In brief, this is a one-day event during which you solve a total of 12 challenging problems(10pts each) during two 3 hours sessions – one in the morning and one in the afternoon. You work alone on all problems. During the break (at lunch) we will all go to Hideaway and have pizza on the house (yeah, the Department of Mathematics will cover it).
Some of the problems are really challenging so you can just do your best. The same thing you do on all your exams, I assume. You can check https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/AnnouncementOfWinners2018.pdf (see page 4) to see that a lot of students cannot solve any of the problems which is just fine. However, solving just two problems completely puts you in the top 600 in the nation. As you already know, solving 2 out of 12 problems on a university exam will not bring you any recognition so you can give it a try and see what happens.
The competition will take place on Saturday, Dec. 7, 2019. The rules are quite simple:
Undergraduate students must participate through their college or university in which they are regularly enrolled. Those who already hold a bachelor’s degree are ineligible. No individual may participate in the competition more than four times.
If you are interested, let me know at dosev@okstate.edu so I can plan accordingly. I can also organize some meetings so we can discuss past problems once I get an idea of how many of you are interested.
Regards
Detelin Dosev