William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada (regardless of the students' nationalities). It awards a scholarship and cash prizes ranging from $250 to $2,500 for the top students and $5,000 to $25,000 for the top schools, plus one of the top five individual scorers (designated as Putnam Fellows) gets graduate tuition waived at Harvard (Putnam Fellow Prize Fellowship), and the top 100 individual scorers have their names mentioned in the American Mathematical Monthly's October issue (alphabetically ordered within rank). It is widely considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the world, and its difficulty is such that the median score is often zero or one (out of 120) despite being attempted by students specializing in mathematics.

The competition was founded in 1927 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband William Lowell Putnam, who was an advocate of intercollegiate intellectual competition. The exam has been offered annually since 1938 and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America.

The Putnam competition now takes place on the first Saturday in December, and consists of two three-hour sittings separated by a lunch break. The test is supervised by faculty members at the participating schools. Each competitor attempts to solve twelve problems, which can typically be solved with only basic knowledge of college mathematics but which require extensive creative thinking.

Each of the twelve questions is worth 10 points, and the most frequent scores above zero are 10 points for a complete solution, 9 points for a nearly complete solution, and 1 point for the beginnings of a solution. In earlier years, the twelve questions were worth one point each, with no partial credit given. The examination is considered to be very difficult: it is typically attempted by students specializing in mathematics, but the median score is usually zero or one point out of 120 possible, and there have been only four perfect scores as of 2010^[update]. In 2003, of the 3,615 students taking the exam, 1024 (28%) scored 10 or more points, and 42 points was sufficient to make the top percentile.

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